


Tales of a Warless World

by TheVulpineHero1



Category: One Hundred Percent Orange Juice, SUGURI (Video Games)
Genre: Cross-Post, F/F, Humor, Kissing, Loose Continuity, No Plot/Plotless, Occasionally Risque, Slice of Life, Survivalverse AU, comfy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-25
Updated: 2020-03-11
Packaged: 2020-03-17 00:15:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 51
Words: 134,421
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18954007
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheVulpineHero1/pseuds/TheVulpineHero1
Summary: A collection of stories following the lives of Suguri, Hime, Sora and friends in a world where everyone lived. Exploratory stories getting to know the characters, and enjoying their happy ending. (Crossposted from my blogspot.)





	1. Explorers

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some preliminary notes before the story starts! Each chapter should more or less be considered its own short story, set in a loose chronological continuity. Stories that directly follow along from each other are denoted by numerals. The quality and style will be pretty uneven, given that these were assembled over a fairly long (2+ years) time period; earlier stories were made just after I got back into writing after a long, multi-year hiatus. 
> 
> As time went on, stories slowly began to filter themselves into two groups: those that focus on Suguri and Hime, and those that focus on Sora and her character set. I ended up commissioning cover images for those groups of stories; to avoid bloat, I'll post these only on the first chapter dealing with that group. My cover images were made by Coffgirl (https://twitter.com/CoffgirlDAZE), and I'll repeat that when they pop up.
> 
> I'll be expunging the original author's notes unless they're super relevant, although I'll start to transcribe them again when we catch up with present day. This collection won't contain all of the Suguri universe stuff I've done, as there are a few little bits and pieces that don't really fit, but 95% of it will make it in.

 

_Cover Art by Coffgirl (<https://twitter.com/CoffgirlDAZE>)_

* * *

 

Two figures wander under the shade of evergreen trees, streaks of silver and gold cast in silhouette by the slowly rising sun. The forest is awakening gradually as the light of the dawn brushes across its face; around them there is the shuffle of the beasts and the birds falling into the rhythm of the day.

“I feel like I've seen this place before,” Suguri says, scratching her head. The world smells of morning dew; there are grass stains on her skirt.

“I shouldn't be surprised,” Hime yawns. “But perhaps not from the ground, and most definitely not with me.”

Her golden hair is a mess. For all her beauty, Hime is a graceless sleeper; she tosses and turns, excited by dreams of the day to come. This world, which Suguri has lived in for ten thousand years, is fresh and new to her, an ever expanding horizon. In a very small and quiet way, Suguri is jealous of that, but being able to see a brand new world being discovered isn't bad either. More by instinct than purpose, she runs her hands through Hime's hair, letting it tumble gently through her fingers until it falls into something approaching its natural arrangement.

“Thank you,” Hime says, a wry smile playing across her lips. “I'm sure the squirrels will appreciate your brief foray into the world of hairdressing.”

“…The squirrels only have to look at you for an hour. I'll be looking at you all day.”

Hime bites back a teasing remark. Although the nominal purpose of the trip is for her to get to know her new home, a large part of it has been getting to know her friend. It isn't easy. There's ten thousand years of history to contemplate, hundreds of formative experiences, opinions, and knowledge. What she has learned thus far is that Suguri, even before she is a strong person, is a warm person – warmer, sometimes, than she can contain. Every so often she misspeaks, or reaches out just a touch too tenderly, and it betrays that warmth when her appearance doesn't.

“Are you done?” Hime asks, tilting her head back in Suguri's hands to look her friend in the face.

Suguri frowns, but her hands keep moving, always gentle, always calm. “Just a little more. The forest won't run away, you know. 

“Oh? You know, I thought it might. I don't have much experience with forests, you know. I suppose we should catch up to it after a while, though.”

Suguri's brow creases; it takes a moment of decision before she decides to play along. “Mm. We're both very fast.”

“Apart from when we're doing hair.”

“Yes, yes,” Suguri says, and abruptly gives Hime's hair a quick ruffle to undo all her hard work. “Are you happy now?”

“Oh, my. Whatever will the squirrels think?”

“Let's go and ask them,” Suguri replies, standing up.

“Won't they run?”

“Of course,” Suguri says, reaching out a hand to help Hime up. “But, after all, we're very fast.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally written to a 500 word limit.


	2. Visionary

It was a Monday, although Mondays had ceased to mean anything for either of them. Living so long threw time into a strange relief. There was the past, which stretched out so far that it could only be comprehended a little at a time; the future, potentially limitless; and the present, vivid and delightful in the moment. There was no place for Mondays in a timeline like that.

The weather, however, still had a measure of respect for Mondays, and had obliged tradition by throwing down lashings of rain since morning. It fell in fat, stinging drops across cobbled streets and trickled down from the roofs of the buildings that had been restored since the war.

Of course, Hime was overjoyed. She was rarely anything else, it seemed. Wet, miserable mornings provided an excuse to put on long coats and clomp around the streets in heavy boots, splashing in puddles and generally taking sensations that had long been denied to her on a starfarer's ship. In particular, Suguri found her love for heavy clothing baffling.

“Well, imagine wearing nothing heavier than a t-shirt for three thousand years. I've gotten so used to light clothes that heavy ones throw off my balance and make things interesting,” Hime had said when asked about it.

Suguri, who had lived comfortably in the same zip-up jacket for four hundred years, didn't quite see the appeal. Neither, though, did she see the appeal of running around in the rain without an umbrella. She was half-tempted to take off and get above cloud level to wait out the showers, but then she'd miss Hime splashing around – and that was something she _did_ see the appeal of.

“Oh, Suguri! You look so silly with your hair plastered to your scalp like that!” Hime giggled, conveniently ignoring the fact that her own hair was scarcely any better. “Oh, I know! We should get hats together. I adore hats!”

“Mm? What kind?”

There was a moment as Hime processed the question, and failed to come up with a satisfactory answer. “Just... hats. In general. All of them, I suppose.”

“I…see. Well, I'm sure there's a hat shop around here somewhere. Shall we get some lunch first?”

Hime came to a dead stop. She stood, straight-backed and dripping with rain, her mouth curved into a little 'o' of sudden, incredible inspiration.

“Suguri,” she said, with an intensity she didn't even muster in the middle of pitched battle. “You are my best friend.”

Suguri let out a low whistle. “That is _terrifying_.”

“Earlier, I saw a shop selling ice cream–”

“Hime, that's a bad–”

“So once, just this _once_ –”

“Listen–”

“Can we have _ice cream_ for _lunch_?”

In her mind's eye, Suguri saw an ice cream dish piled high with as many scoops as would fit. She saw mounds of brightly coloured sprinkles. She saw eight different kinds of sauces, and sickly-sweet stomach aches.

With her real eye, she saw Hime pouting. She sighed.

“Strawberry or chocolate?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally written to a 500 word limit.


	3. Domesticated

 There were times in Suguri's life when speed was a necessity. Bullets, for example, did not have a tendency to hang around while you leisurely sauntered out of the way; An impending crisis did not allow you the time to drink your last sip of tea and nibble a granola bar before you set out.

Using the computer was another of these situations. Normally, Suguri used it to gather data about the state of the world's environment. While the world had more or less recovered from the Great War of the past, Suguri still had a duty to collate data, locate key areas of environmental crises, do what she could to stop them, and send back first-hand accounts of the severity when she couldn't.

The problem with using the computer was that Hime was bonded to it on a spiritual level and seemed to have a sixth sense that told her when it had been turned on. Within fifteen minutes of it being booted up, she would stop whatever she was doing and wander into the room as if drawn by magnetism. She would look at Suguri, look at the quietly humming machine on her lap, and say, in her most innocent and delighted voice: “Oh, you're using the computer? Can I see?”

The phenomenon, Suguri found, was very strong. Pots of rice had been left to burn, newspapers had gone unread, bowls of porridge had cooled into wintry oat deserts. For a few days Suguri had trialled the tactic of only using it when Hime was in the shower, but that only led to Hime meandering into the living room sopping wet, a towel clinging half-heartedly to her slender body, with complaints about having run out of some obscure bathroom necessity.

Upon discovering the computer, she would plop herself into the chair next to Suguri – curling into her body ever so slightly – and gaze at whatever data Suguri was looking at. She had a good mind for it, often remembering more than Suguri did herself. But after exactly twelve and a half minutes, without fail, she would shift ever so slightly closer and say:

“Suguri? May we watch videos of cats?”

And without fail, Suguri would sigh, look at the occasionally half-naked woman next to her, and open a video of a cat. (She was quite sure that Hime had seen every video of a cat still in existence. She was also quite sure Hime was capable of starting the computer and watching videos of cats by herself, but for some reason never had the desire to).

For the next hour or so, Hime would watch the screen with rapt attention, occasionally pausing to explain that cats were new and wonderful to her, spaceships being generally deprived of feline company. When the hour was done, she would rush off to tend to whatever calamity had ensued in her absence.

Suguri herself was not nearly so fond of cats. But she found it just as fun to watch Hime instead.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally written to a 500 word limit.


	4. Inevitable

Eggs, milk, flour, butter; from those ingredients, the day is born. She glances down at the recipe, checking through the steps just one more time before she launches into action. It isn't the first time she's made pancakes, but she's had enough mishaps in the kitchen not to count her eggs before they're cooked.

The smell of hot fat in a heavy iron pan was never one she imagined she'd grow to appreciate, but there are many things about her new home that have surprised her, and pleasantly at that. Every morning, birdsong winds its way through the yew tree beside the house and into the living room; there's nothing in space that can compare to being woken so gently, so naturally. Even now, songbirds twitter outside the window, dipping and carving through the air more gracefully than even she can.

Cooking does not come naturally to her, not nearly as much as singing, or dancing, or war. There's a science to it, and an art, and she can never quite seem to combine the two, but her enthusiasm makes up for it – or so Suguri says. Really, she thinks Suguri is just happy to get breakfast at all. For all her unflappable skill in other areas, the girl makes a hapless chef, always just a little impatient and overly willing to take short cuts on the way to getting fed. Her omelettes are always speckled with long, silvery hair, her eggs are always overcooked, and she'll happily cut her toast with a beam sword if she can't find a knife. Hime quickly learned that if she wanted real meals, she'd be making them herself; today, like every morning, she dons her apron dutifully, if not with gusto.

With the pancake batter gently sizzling in the pan and the bacon safely in the oven, she allows her mind to drift a little towards other, less gratifying concerns. She'll need to set the table, which is usually easier said than done. Historically, home decoration is not a thing Suguri has afforded a lot of thought to, and as a result what little cutlery she has in an eclectic, unfathomable mix. They have more corkscrews than they do forks, and there are five different can-openers but only one sad, bent little silver teaspoon. Knives, however, seem to multiply in their drawers at an alarming rate.

The same design philosophy – or lack thereof – applies to the furniture. Alongside the cavernous beanbag chair currently serving as Hime's sleeping quarters, they have an old wicker chair, a barstool and a coffee table that has never seen a cup of coffee in its life – principally because Suguri insists that it belongs in the bathroom, for reasons that only make sense in an alternative universe. After a week of not-so-subtle prodding, Suguri had finally capitulated and brought home a loveseat so they could sit down together, and Hime had been very pleased until she lifted out the cushions and found a collection of coins that hadn't been minted in over a hundred years. Still, it was progress, and that was what counted.

Definitely their most attractive piece was the kitchen table, which had almost nothing wrong with it provided that you didn't check the underside for fire damage. Otherwise, it almost seemed a shame to cover it with a cloth; it was elmwood, hard and smooth and cool to the touch, with attractive flecks between the grain. Trees, and the gifts that they gave, were one of Hime's favourite things about a terrestrial lifestyle.

With the pancakes cooked (or a close approximation of it), she piles them onto the plates and sets out to capture some chairs. She takes the wicker chair for herself, and leaves the barstool for Suguri; it makes her feel a bit taller, and there's no weave to catch her hair in. She pours out the last of the milk for Suguri and some apple juice for herself, both served in whiskey glasses because of _course_ they don't have anything resembling a normal glass. By the time she's finished she can hear the familiar _bump, bump, bump_ of slippers coming down the stairs.

Suguri, she has learned, is not a morning person. Suguri is hardly even an afternoon person. If there's nothing catastrophic to motivate her, she spends her first two waking hours in a warm, contented daze, before eventually transitioning into the calm, slightly bemused state that Hime knew and loved. That wasn't, of course, to say that there weren't perks to Morning Suguri.

“G'morning,” Suguri says as she wanders into the kitchen, her hands balled in the sleeves of her powder-blue pyjamas. It actually comes out as 'guurmaaahnnnin', because syllables are not a thing Suguri really endorses at the best of times and even less so when freshly awoken, but Hime has a keen ear and a passion for Suguri-whispering. There is one thing she can pronounce, though. “Hug.”

Morning hugs were one of the pleasant surprises that Hime found herself with in her new home. Why Suguri demanded one every morning without fail was a mystery to her, and one she could care less about the answer to; it was far easier, and more pleasant, to let Suguri shuffle over to her, wrap her arms around her waist, and gently headbutt her shoulder. Hime's part of the hug was to gently run her hands through Suguri's long hair until the girl relaxed into the embrace.

“Hime,” Suguri mumbles into her shoulder. “You smell of bacon.”

Hime smiles, and rubs her cheeck against the top of Suguri's head. “Yes, well, bacon is delicious. You, on the other hand, smell of not showering.”

“Muuuuuh. I'll do it after breakfast.”

“Ahh. So childish,” Hime teases, perhaps a little indulgently. In the morning Suguri acts like a kid, but she gets to be childish for the rest of the day.

“Nyuh. It takes too long. I wanna cut my hair.”

“Well, I don't disagree. We could get matching hairstyles.”

The thought goes without a reply; whatever strange desire propels Suguri to indiscriminate hugging has been temporarily sated, and now she has her stomach to attend to. Gently disentangling herself from Hime's arms, she floats over to the barstool (there is usually a no-flying pact while they're in the house, because it leads to a lot of collisions with lampshades, but Hime lets it slide), and perches precariously on top of it, her long silver hair hanging down behind her. She drinks half of the milk at a gulp, grimaces, and finishes off the rest; this part of Suguri's morning is, Hime has been told, Very Important. Before long a plate of pancakes has materialised in front of her, complete with a few crispy rashers of bacon as a bonus.

“How is it?” Hime asks, carefully dissecting her own pancakes with a knife. She's a little disappointed with how they turned out; she was going for fluffy, but ended up with dense instead.

“Mpfmf,” Suguri replied, attacking her own plate with considerably less restraint.

“I'll take that as a passing grade, then. C minus, perhaps.”

“Nuh. B.”

The meal continues in relative quiet; because neither of them is all that good at cooking, they both have a healthy respect for whatever food does survive their ministrations. Besides, they have all day for conversation, and birdsong in the meantime. There is nothing wrong, Hime thinks, with a comfortable silence. Before long, Suguri is sitting back – as much as she can on a barstool, anyway – and letting the food work its way through her system. The process of waking up has begun.

“You know,” Hime says, watching Suguri stretch, “I think breakfast is one of the planetside traditions I wish we'd kept most in when we went to space. Everybody just ate when they felt like it, there.”

Suguri yawns, and hops down from the barstool. “Mm. I think it's one of my favourite traditions now, too. I'll get the plates.”

Hime smiles, but there is just a touch of steel behind it. “Oh no, you don't. I think _I_ shall get the plates, and _you_ can get a shower. You smell fine right now, but you'd smell better with some of that body wash I picked up the other day.”

“Muurgh. Fine,” Suguri says, wearing what seems dangerously close to a pout. “I'll see you in an hour or so.”

Actually, it's usually an hour and a half, but she can dream. Before she walks out of the kitchen, Suguri turns, takes in Hime's golden hair and glowing smile, and remembers that her mornings were not always so; that once upon a time there was no sound, and breakfast was a slice of bread with nothing on it.

“Hime. Thank you for cooking for me. I'd like it if you'd cook for me tomorrow, too.”

“And the day after that, and the day after that... I'll be a respectable chef in no time,” Hime smiles. “It is, as always, a pleasure.”

Their gazes meet, and for a moment Suguri feels a warmth that has nothing to do with a full belly or the sunshine streaming in from the window. She feels herself waking up, her mind whirring into motion to really start the day.

“Wait,” she says, slowly. “Hime?”

“Yes?”

As the haze of sleep lifts, Suguri's placid smile drops a little; her eyes widen as she checks and re-checks what she's seeing. Bare shoulders, exposed legs. Her fingertips vaguely recall the feel of warm skin. “Uh. Well. Are you, um, wearing anything, under that apron?”

“Ah. I was wondering if you'd notice. I thought I'd try it out, just the once. Earth traditions are so very fascinating, don't you agree?” Hime asks, with a smile as golden as the sun. “I should probably warn you – I'm about to turn around to do the dishes. I _do_ hope you enjoy your shower.”


	5. The Fanservice Episode, Frankly

Suguri was not, particularly, a fan of the ocean. The raw power of her body was enough to dissuade concerns about breathing, and even the thousands of atmospheres worth of pressure to a certain extent, but she was all too aware that in the Great War, humanity had been rather more focused on how to litter the sea with mines than with how to get them back out again. Even with her abilities, clean up had been a long, dangerous process, and more still might be lurking in the dark, unknown pockets of the deep. There was no way to know.

As a result, she wasn't quite as enthused by the idea of a summer beach trip as Hime had been. There were upsides, of course. The sea breeze was one of Suguri's favourite things; part of her believed that she had been a seagull in her past life. She was also partial to the building and subsequent destruction of elaborate sandcastles, to symbolise the artifices of man returning to the bosom of the ocean.

There was, however, an additional factor in Suguri's decision to attend the beach day, although she had every intention of denying it when it inevitably came up. A week prior she had spotted Hime sneaking into the house in the earlier hours, armed with a two-piece bikini that was a shade below scandalous but still firmly in the daring category. She hadn't been able to get a good look at it, but she was fairly sure it was frilly, and a Hime with frills was relevant to her interests to say the least. Also relevant to Suguri's interests, in no particular order, were: Hime running barefoot along the sands and giggling; Hime standing waist-deep in the ocean with sunlit golden hair and her beautiful wings reflected against the rolling waves; and hitting watermelons with sticks. (Some pleasures were too simple to be denied).

Upon reaching the beach, the pair had retired to the changing rooms, and Suguri had shrugged on her own swimsuit. It wasn't too flattering, although it wasn't as though she had much to flatter; Suguri was built for speed, with lean, defined muscles in her shoulders and her back. Her long hair did, however, mean she could get away with a halter top without anybody staring too much, and all she needed after that was a pair of shorts. Shorts, mercifully, were easy to shop for; usually, shopping for swimwear ranked at number six in the top ten list of Suguri's Biggest Waking Nightmares. She just had very defined tastes, and nobody seemed to appreciate grey swimsuits with a single stripe on them as much as she did.

Having changed much faster than Hime (as usual), Suguri looked out at the fine, pale sands and resolved that before the day was over, she would achieve her life's ambition of making a sand castle that she could fit inside. But the day was long, and she was fast; there would be time for castle-building later. Now was the time of garishly striped towels and beach umbrellas that consistently threatened to fall over, and she wasted no time in installing hers in the middle of the beach. By the time the others arrived, Suguri had already acquired flip flops, novelty sunglasses and the beginnings of a tan, and was busy lying face down on her beach towel like a fried egg with a grey, fluffy yolk.

“Hey, shortie. You didn't bring your luggage with you?”

Suguri tilted her head upwards and saw Nanako, who was hefting a beach bag almost as big as she was. As always, she seemed a touch bitter; Suguri sometimes had problems getting along with her, although Hime was of the opinion that Nana just enjoyed grousing as a way to vent stress,

“Ah, you've arrived. If by 'luggage' you meant Hime, she's still changing,” Suguri replied peacefully, looking Nana up and down. The diminutive soldier had gone for a violet one-piece that was more cute than it was dignified, although Suguri guessed that there weren't that many alluring outfits available for somebody of Nanako's size. Some impish part of her decided to push that button a little. “...I was sure you'd be wearing a school swimsuit, though.”

“I don't care what you idiots say. I'm not in ninth grade! I am a _professional soldier_ with a number of completed campaigns –”

“And a record of losing to me in sword fights.”

“– and a record of losing to you in sword fights because you _cheat_ by having such long arms –”

“I can't control how long my arms are.”

“I can't control how tall I am! I looked _everywhere_ for a nice, mature-looking swimsuit but I got landed with this frilly, cutesy mess while _Kae_ , Kae looks like she's trying to dam the Victoria Falls with a picket fence, just spilling out everywhere and _argh!_ ”

Nanako threw herself on the sand in frustration, before rolling over and affixing Suguri with a dangerous, steely glare.

“You and me, we should form an alliance. Did you know that being short used to make you a sex symbol? It's true! I dug out some old music from before that stupid war you guys had, and all they ever sing about is shorties. 'Shortie, you so hot! Shortie, get low! Shortie got me spending the benjamins!' All stuff like that. We could rule together.”

Suguri arranged her face into a peaceful, innocent smile. “I'll form an alliance with you. But you have to accept me as the leader.”

“...What would your first order be?” Nanako asked, eyes narrowing.

“To go and explain to Kae why, in detail, you've been staring at her chest for long enough to construct similes about it.”

“Tch. No dice,” the girl said, and rolled over to face the other way. “I hate arguing with you. It always makes me so tired. I just wanna sit down and relax afterwards.”

Suguri sighed, and very gently patted Nanako on the head, expecting her to jerk her head away at any moment. Her hair was surprisingly soft and healthy; evidently she took good care of it.

“...Your swimsuit doesn't look awful. Tell me where you got it next time,” Nana said after a while.

“Yes, yes.”

Perhaps, in an alternative world, the moment would have continued. The sounds of the waves against the shores, of seagulls chattering overhead, would have lulled Nanako into an easy sleep. She would have awoken hours later, sunburnt on the side of her that was peeking out from Suguri's lopsided beach umbrella, and her absolute incandescent rage would have been mollified by memories of Suguri gently fussing with her hair.

Alas, this would have had to been an alternative world where Kae did not exist and was not the greatest source of noise on the beach. She charged along, a beach umbrella under one arm, kicking up a stream of flying sand with her footsteps, yelling at the top of her voice – and the top of her voice was taller than some mountains. Suguri took a glance in her direction and immediately regretted it; Nanako had _not_ been joking when she talked about spillage. She looked just long enough to feel vaguely jealous before turning away, which was just as well, because the next thing Kae did was launch herself through the air in a beautiful parabolic arc toward their location. She hit with the force of a small explosive, planting her beach umbrella into the ground like a sword and distributing a fine layer of sand over the face and body of every person in a 100 metre radius.

“Safe!” the redhead yelled, flashing a peace signal to her two friends.

Suguri, drawing on over 10,000 years of life experience, had wisely made the decision to close her eyes and mouth. Nanako had not, and was in the delicate process of trying to make death threats while excavating roughly a tenth of the beach from her lungs. She was having little success with either, but this made no difference to Kae, who had already thrown herself at Suguri for a full-body hug. After a relatively minor but confusing scuffle, they came to a rest with Kae's warm cheek pressed gently against Suguri's navel.

“Ahahahaha! It's been so long since I saw you, Sugi! What are you doing lying around? You should be playing volleyball! Summer is all about friendly competition!”

Suguri had come to two conclusions, neither of which was about volleyball. The first was that Kae was part puppy, and had to express that by nuzzling people to death. The second was that Kae's swimsuit had more in common with a coat of paint on a car than with an actual piece of fabric designed for human beings.

Bravely extricating herself from Kae's embrace, Suguri put on her responsible adult voice. “Ah... I think if we played volleyball, one of us would have a malfunction.”

Kae gave a thumbs up. She often gestured as she spoke, with enough ferocity to put any angry waiter to shame. “Don't worry, don't worry! This body was built to last!”

“I'll play volleyball with you, Kae,” Nanako seethed, her eyes flashing pure murderous intent. “But I get to use my bits as well, since you're so _tall,_ and, and _buxom_. And if I win, you have to be quiet for one hour for every point I won by.”

“Uuuu... That doesn't seem fair. But I don't ever see Nana this fired up. What to do...? Aha! I know! If I win, I get to dress Nana up however I want for the rest of the day!”

Both girls looked at Suguri, who sighed and nodded. “Alright. I've witnessed the conditions of the bet. Play fair, you two. Or mostly fair, anyway.”

Almost before she had finished speaking the two were away, trading verbal jabs and actual lasers with impunity. Suguri watched them become dots in the sky, and wondered how exactly they intended to play volleyball without a net. It didn't matter, she supposed; Nanako was spoiling for a fight more than anything, and Kae would be more than willing to give her one.

“Oh, my. Are those two at it already? I don't know if they get along badly or a bit too well,” a voice remarked from behind Suguri's shoulder. It was warm, cheerful, as clear as song. Hime. “I'm also disappointed in you, Suguri. I look away for mere moments and another woman has captured your belly-button for herself.”

Suguri tilted her head back to take a long, upside-down look at Hime and her swimsuit. There were ruffles. There was a black and gold high neck bikini top and a black sarong cut just low enough to show the delicate lines leading down from the hips. There was a dry smile on Hime's face which probably meant Suguri was being a little too obvious. “Aha. Well, you were changing for quite a while,” she said, clearing her throat.

“True enough. No matter. I shall just have to win back your heart with delicious ice cream,” Hime replied, leaning down to hand Suguri a scoop. Had she been carrying ice cream cones, Suguri wondered? Her eyes had definitely been elsewhere. “It's a shame that Saki, Iru and Kyoko couldn't make it.”

“Mm,” Suguri nodded. Especially since those three were generally much less erratic than Nanako and Kae were.

“Well, I was more worried about Nana and Kae in the first place. The others have spread out a little and started to explore, but I don't think those two have found what they really want from this planet yet...”

Suguri frowned. This was one of those moments that seemed to demand a sensitive, emotional response, and she didn't have one ready. The words always seemed to elude her, as surely as she eluded bullets and lasers. “We can take care of them for a while longer,” she replied. It wasn't quite the response she had wanted to give, but it was the one she had to settle for.

“I suppose I should stop being a mother hen. Speaking of, are you wearing sunscreen?”

“Was that why you took so long changing? You were putting on sunscreen?”

“Very good! Gold star for Suguri,” Hime said with a grin, and sat down beside her on the sand. “My skin is so pale from being in the spaceship all those years that I have to be careful with it. You didn't answer my question, though.”

“I don't really need it. My skin never tans or burns. And I have no intention of leaving this umbrella, anyway.”

“Oh, that's ridiculous. I'm sure you'll want to play in the sun at some point. Here, roll over and I'll do your back for you,” Hime said, with an expression of perfect innocence that guaranteed she was up to something.

“Don't worry. I can do it myself.”

“Oh my, how impressive. How flexible and dexterous you must be!” Hime replied, with a gleam in her eye. “Incidentally, how good are you at rope escape?”

Suguri sighed. The answer, of course, was 'not good enough to get out of Binding Chains'. She grunted and rolled over in deference to Hime's passionate advocacy of responsible skincare. With a satisfied giggle, Hime scooted across and sat on her.

“Hime? You're sitting on my butt.”

“Yes, I'm quite aware.”

“Is there any reason?”

“You sit on it all the time. It seemed the obvious place.”

The logic was flawless, and Suguri couldn't refute it. Instead, she just closed her eyes and appreciated the breeze rolling in from the sea. Hime, meanwhile, busied herself with scooping up armfuls of long, silver hair and moving it away from Suguri's back.

“Ooh. Nice definition,” Hime murmured as she began to work damp fingertips around the muscles of Suguri's shoulders. Suguri said nothing, and was trying very hard to think nothing as well; for all her efforts to approximate a plank of wood, she wasn't having much luck. She tried closing her eyes and allowing the sound of the waves to fill her mind.

“Hey.” Suguri was surprised to hear her own voice. She hadn't particularly planned to say anything.

“Mm?”

“Why is this so important to you?”

Hime tilted her head a little in thought, but her hands continued to insinuate themselves against Suguri's muscles like the ocean licking at the sands. “Oh, well. A few reasons. It's part of the beach experience, I suppose, to rub sunscreen on somebody's back. Spaceships, in general, are not equipped with beach facilities, and water is a precious resource. We never got sun tans. We never wore swimsuits. Hm... How do I put it? For you, Suguri, this might not be a special occasion, but for me, and for Kae and Nanako as well, it has the taste of a kind of life we were never allowed by circumstance to lead.”

“I see.” The sound of the waves seemed to blend with the words and give them a strange, mystical texture. Hime's hands crept down the plains of her back and then returned to her shoulders, in a long, sinuous pattern.

“Another reason is that you've been so patient with us, Suguri, and with me in particular. To have had you here to welcome us to this strange, wide-open world has meant more than I can say. Sometimes I just want to spoil you a little in return. This doesn't feel bad, right?”

The only response Suguri could conjure was a non-committal but vaguely embarrassed little sound from the back of her throat; Hime met it with a sparkling laugh.

“Of course, that's a third reason. You're quite fun to tease, Suguri. You're so very serious all the time, and you always try not to react but do anyway.”

“And is that why you tease me so much?”

Hime took a moment to to coat her hands with a little more lotion. “Would you prefer a short and fun answer, or a long and serious one?”

“Well,” Suguri replied dryly, “Since I'm such a serious person, I'll take the serious answer.”

“I thought as much.” Hime's hands had drifted as low as Suguri's waist; her movements were slower, lingering, and her words matched. “I've lived for ten thousand years, Suguri. You know how long that is. But for the vast majority of that time, I've lived in the same, tiny place. The same days, the same faces, endlessly repeating. Oh, Suguri. I used to look at those travellers who we brought to Earth, and I could take apart their faces and say what belonged to their great, great grandfathers, where the family trees had crossed, that kind of thing. In a restricted pool like that, there are only so many genes you can have, you know? Only so many faces, so many combinations.”

Suguri said nothing. If there was one thing she was good at, it was that.

“Well, at any rate, if you live for too long like that, time starts to... blend together, just a touch. More than a touch. For a long, long while, it felt like I was living the same day over and over. Like time had stopped, for me. Just for me. But then we saw Earth on our horizons, with that horrible man at the helm. The only reason I didn't stop him earlier was because I assumed he would die of old age before he got the chance to do any real damage, but... Anyway. Things started moving again. Now every day is different. There are so many people to meet, with so many faces I've never seen or dreamt of before. This world, this Earth of yours, is constantly spinning. In motion. I feel like that's so important.”

“It's your Earth, too. Mm. That feels nice.” Hime was tracing circles with her thumbs across the edges of Suguri's hips; she gave a satisfied little sigh and applied herself to the task with more gusto.

“I suppose it is, at that. But, Suguri. Sometimes when I look at you, I feel... I feel like your time stopped somewhere on the way, too. Some days you wake up, and you wear the same face all day. It's... Well, I don't think it's good to do that. And anyway, I'm childish and selfish. I want to see all the different faces you can make, Suguri, not just the one you use all the time. That's why I tease you from time to time. To stop the moments from blending. I'm hoping that one day, I won't even have to tease you; you'll just wake up and smile, and blush, and laugh by yourself instead of keeping that same face.”

“And what will you do then?” Suguri asked. Her voice was sleepy. Her body was sleepy. She felt like she was talking in a dream.

“Well... I'll probably keep teasing you. But perhaps I won't be joking about it. Your back is done, by the way,” Hime replied, and stood up. “Of course, I could always do your front for you, if you'd like.”

Suguri didn't need to look to know that Hime was wearing a devious grin. But she stood up and looked anyway. After all the talk of keeping the same face, she realised that perhaps she hadn't been paying enough attention to Hime's. “If I said yes, would you do it?”

Hime blinked, and for a moment a flash of colour spread into her pale cheeks; but it was just for a moment. “You could always take your chances and find out.”

“I'll pass.”

“Oh, boo. It's rude to raise a lady's hopes and then dash them.”

Suguri found, as she had always found, that there were moments in life when it was necessary to trust one's body over one's brain. Decisions could not always be taken with a full set of information on which to base rationale, and anyway, there were sometimes sensations that the brain filtered out of conscious experience but still registered on a smaller level, and those could be as indicative of oncoming danger as any larger portents. She couldn't quite tell what prompted her to move as she did, but in that moment she was absolutely sure that the correct course of action was to launch herself towards Hime, scoop up her friend in her arms, and clear the next six feet of ground as soon as possible. She had cleared the first three feet when Kae and Nanako barrelled out of an empty sky at a speed that beggared belief and crashed into the beach, sending a plume of sand skyward.

“ _One, two, three, four, I win the THUUUMB WAAAAAR!_ ” Kae howled, lifting Nanako into the air by one arm like a referee lifting a boxer's arm in victory. “Hey, hey, Big Sis Hime! Do you think Nana would look better as a punk rocker, or with cat ears?”

“Go with whatever your heart tells you, Kae,” Hime said indulgently. “But remember: when it comes to cat ears, proper etiquette demands a tail as well.”

Nana, although her eyes were more inclined to look in different directions to one another in that moment in time, still had the wherewithal to look at Hime lounging in Suguri's arms and ask, in a very groggy voice, “Am we... Was I... Is we... Inter'pting somethink?”

“Oh, nothing that we can't continue later,” Hime said with a wink, climbing down.

“She means 'no, nothing',” Suguri deadpanned. “I don't suppose you two would like to put the beach back where it belongs?”

“Nope!” Kae said proudly, conspicuously not looking at giant crater she had left.

Suguri sighed. “I suppose we'll pick a different beach next year. It's about time to split the watermelon. Would you go and fetch it?”

Kae had vanished before the sentence was finished. Hitting things with sticks was very much a Kae thing, and she dragged Nanako along in her wake. Suguri didn't expect her to come back with one watermelon; rather, she expected to see her juggling three. As the two departed, Hime gave Suguri a nudge.

“Next year, hm? I don't recall discussing a second trip.”

“Well, it hasn't been a bad day. I want to make a sandcastle next time.”

“Oh, yes. There's still things the beach has to offer us. I was planning to bury you up to your neck in the sand and then poke your cheeks.”

“...Don't make me change my mind.”

A year, Suguri thought, had always been such a short time. That was the problem. Time didn't freeze, as Hime said; it just went faster and faster while you weren't looking, and for all her speed Suguri had never been able to catch up with it. You blinked, and the Earth had come to the same spot again, and all that had changed was the year. But here, today, she blinked: the Earth remained where it was, and the year was the same, but her friends were wearing different expressions. It hadn't been a bad day, here at the beach.

It hadn't been a bad day at all.


	6. Lazy Sunday

It was a lazy Sunday. Well, it would have been. It was a curious phenomenon; before Suguri met Hime, every Sunday was a lazy Sunday. It was the only flavour of Sunday available. You could perhaps make a call to the manager of the Sunday store and ask her to stock new and innovative varieties of Sunday, and she would simply push up her metaphorical glasses and say, “Our consumer data says that Lazy Sundays are the best selling Sunday by far. Do you know how many Lazy Sundays are being consumed worldwide? In fact, we have a 100% takeup rate. Why would we stock anything else, given that everybody loves Lazy Sundays so much?”

Well, you would say, Lazy Sundays are very nice and nobody is denying that, but a change is as good as a rest, isn’t it? There’s nothing wrong with trying just a little something new every once in a while to see if you like it. The store manager would look at you, check the data on her phone (which looks suspiciously _not_ like actual data and more like a candy-based puzzle game) and say, “Sorry, but it just wouldn’t be profitable for us. If you want Sundays, you’ll just have to abide by the ones we have, or check with one of our competitors. By the way, the only ones we have are lazy ones, and our competitors don’t exist.”

So, defeated, you would slink back to your bed for an enforced lie-in of at least two hours, followed by shuffling about to make an easy breakfast so you could count as being awake at noon. It was the only choice.

Until, of course, Hime appeared. Hime had taken the world of Sunday selling by storm, mainly because she was from Space, and Space’s idea of a Sunday was very different. Mainly it didn’t exist, because having seven days of the week when you _weren’t_ on a chunk of rock hurtling through space around the day’s namesake seemed a little silly.

In the end, Hime had bravely purged any and all traces of the insidious Lazy Sunday from Suguri’s home, because Lazy Sundays bored her and there were few things as dangerous as Hime when she was bored. It brought out her impish streak, which was a mile wide and twice as long, with every step being a new and embarrassing hazard for anybody trying to walk the path. She was a master at unexpected teasing, a 2nd Dan at dry retorts, an unrelenting agent of whimsy that spread her missive of mischief as far as her arms would allow.

In short, Hime had not sat in the core of a spaceship for 10,000 years so she could be bored and sleep in all day. She did, at least, come fully furnished with helpful suggestions for things that would entertain her and keep everybody within an arm’s reach of their sanity.

“Suguri, let’s go visit Saki today.”

Suguri sucked the top of her pen. She was valiantly wrestling with the crossword puzzle, which she knew from experience was harder than wrestling a polar bear. There were things printed words on a sheet of tree pulp could do to your brain that even half a ton of raw ursine muscle and carnivorous intent couldn’t.

“I do enjoy Saki’s company,” she murmured, in between scrawling “apotheosis” into the little box with her childish, loopy handwriting.

“Of course you do. She’s blonde, homeless, and hilariously dangerous. You have a track record with that kind of girl, you know,” Hime said. Hime was currently draped across the loveseat, her head lolling over the arm, looking at Suguri upside down. Her hair was hanging down; her forehead was formidable.

“One girl does not constitute a track record. Ooh, constitute. I think that fits. Anyway, even if I enjoyed myself, what would you do?”

“Gossip about old times, braid each other’s hair, debase myself for baked goods. It has all the makings of a fun afternoon!”

Suguri sighed, and shut her newspaper. It was a reluctant admission of defeat; even her smallest, squigliest handwriting had not managed to compress ‘recalcitrant’ into a space meant for four letters. “Yes, well. Last I heard, Saki was in Brazil. Even with our speed, we’d struggle to fly to Brazil in less than twelve hours.”

Hime pouted. Or perhaps not. Hime was very good at pouting without actually pouting. She would imply a pout, and that made them all the more effective because she could still retain the appearance of being refined and sanguine while being childish. “Oh, boo. I know! Let’s hire out a rowboat. We can enjoy a day on the water. Me, you, the sunshine, dragonflies, reeds, lilypads, krakens...”

Aside from the fact that Hime didn’t seem to know if she wanted to sail down the River Nile or straight down into the cold, pressurised depths of the ocean, Suguri had some private objections to that plan. Firstly, she thought Hime had spent enough time on boats. A spaceship, according to Suguri, was just a boat that happened to be in space. According to Hime, it was a ship, because a boat had to have oars, and could you imagine trying to paddle to Neptune? Neither one of them was correct, but both of them were very passionate about it.

Secondly, Suguri had recently brought home a bookshelf. (She didn’t know quite how she’d done it. She acquired furniture the same way that people acquired lost puppies; it just sort’ve appeared at her ankles one day and she picked it up and fussed it and gave it a loving home). She had donated it to Hime, and kept a semi-close eye on the contents. In the last two weeks, it had accrued a number of books about pirates, and Suguri thought that Hime might not be able to resist an opportunity to swash some buckles.

“Why don’t you take a look at your unfinished knitting projects?” Suguri asked, jerking her head towards the corner. The corner was dominated by a sprawling jungle of worsted spread, in a variety of beautiful pastel colours. Last time Suguri had checked, Hime had been working on a shapeless bundle of cloth that she described as ‘a scarf, but it’s a very postmodern kind of scarf.’

Hime winced. “Aha. I think I’ll leave that for today. One day, I shall have needlework that strikes wonder into the hearts of the gods themselves, but I have thousands of years to attain that skill, so I needn’t be in a hurry.”

Suguri smiled to herself. She had knit, on and off, for a stretch of fifty years in her ten thousand year life, but Hime was adamant about learning to do it herself. The next time Hime went to stay with Kyoko, Saki or Iru, Suguri fully intended to knit her a nice sweater to see the reaction. (Suguri had also, in her past, spent a long time wrangling various ‘postmodern’ knitted garments back into wearable shape, with questionable success.)

“Hah… That still doesn’t solve the problem of what to do. Suguri, do you mind if I spoon feed you three tubs of chocolate fudge ice cream? I feel like that will bring us both closer to enlightenment.”

In Suguri’s opinion, the only thing eating three tubs of ice cream in a row would enlighten her of was her lunch. She took the suggestion as the warning shot that it was. It was time to unveil her secret weapon.

“Hime, how much do you like loud noises?”

“I’m not really a huge fan,” Hime said, conveniently forgetting that she was sometimes a steady source of loud noises.

“Okay. How much do you like Kae?”

“I feel like you just asked the same question twice but in different ways. Oh well. I suppose it depends on how you serve her – rare, medium or well done?”

“Anything less than well done wouldn’t even singe that one. Anyway, she recently made some friends who are also loud and have guitars, and sent us some free tickets.”

“Free tickets! Those are the best kind,” Hime replied wryly. “Oh, but what shall I wear? My wardrobe is rather light on ripped t-shirts and spiked collars, although that could be addressed. Will we need to daub ourselves with eyeliner and draw stars on our faces, do you think?”

With that, Hime launched herself from the loveseat, pleased with the itenerary of the day. It was a fine one. There would be loud noises and moshing, which, in Hime’s understanding, was like dancing except it incorporated violence, and thus was a fusion of two things she was rather good at. There would also be Kae, who would most likely be louder than the band, but always a source of fun.

Suguri watched her go, pleased with her work. Although crossword mastery still eluded her, Hime was happy and not sowing gentile chaos in the surrounding area, which was victory enough. Unlike Hime, though, Suguri knew exactly what she would be wearing to Kae’s concert.

Earplugs.


	7. Slumber

An aching head. Heavy limbs. Too heavy. She can’t lift her feet. No strength. Words have colours. Sounds are more than sounds.

“...it can’t hurt.”

Strange words. A strange place. All she remembers is a blue sky. Endless. The black clouds were beneath her. Satisfaction. Her heart was beating fast.

“She _did_ attack us for no reason…”

The world is soft, blurred at the edges. The sounds are soft. How long has it been since her heart beat like that? Yesterday, a thousand years ago. How many years since her eyes were open, since her ears could hear?

“She had reasons. We just don’t understand them. She’s one of this planet’s legends, Hime.”

“Well, I can’t deny her strength…”

The world is slowly drawing into focus. Her body is remembering. She is awake. Painfully, painfully awake. Covered by a duvet. So heavy. She remembers blankets being thinner, in her day. Not as luxurious. There was no luxury in the military. No choice.

“...She feels a little like you, Suguri. You, but broken.”

“It’s not surprising. My power was created to restore the planet she saved. We share a purpose. Probably a design, too.”

She rolls over, her arms trembling. She’s so hungry. So exhausted. Her throat is sore. How long was she asleep this time? A day, a week, a year?

“Ahahaha.” A laugh, like fingers across piano keys. “I suppose so. The resemblance really is striking. I don’t know what I shall do with two of you.”

“...You’re agreeing, then?”

“Oh, why not. The more the merrier. I would have preferred a puppy, but a girl is fine too.”

Footsteps, very quiet. A light rumbling, somewhere far away, gives way to a whistle. Not the long, sustained drone of a military alarm, but a wavering cry, almost like a strong wind. Sudden desire grips her; she wants to see the blue sky. She wants to fly again.

“I wonder, though… Is cocoa really going to be enough?”

“They built them tough back then.”

More footsteps. Padding, the clap of plastic soles on tiled floor, a compression of silk. It’s those things civilians wear at home. Slippers. That’s what they were called. Water pouring into a cup, a spoon clinking against ceramics. The sounds make sense. She remembers this.

“Is she awake?”

“Maybe. She strikes me as a heavy sleeper.”

“Hilarious, Suguri. Original, too.”

“I try.”

She tries to answer them. She’s not sure what she’s trying to say – something lucid, cogent perhaps – but it comes out as a long, rasping groan. She feels like she’s not had a drink in years. She realises that she’s right. The duvet lifts, and she faces an unfamiliar ceiling.

“Hello, Sora. We met yesterday,” Suguri says. Long, grey hair. Lithe body. The spitting image of herself. Apart from the eyes. Such focused eyes. “Here. Careful – it’s hot.”

The girl presses a warm mug to her lips. The smell of chocolate. Memories of childhood. She sips, and tastes only heat.

“What happened?” Her voice is a croak. She remembers a battle in the sky, her anger waxing hot. She had shouted a lot. Probably unwisely.

The girl smiles. Smiles. So rare, in the war. So full of wonder. “You overdid it. Flying around without eating or drink after so long was pushing it. Fighting us was too much.”

“I should say so. I still have the bruises. Blaming us for some snow clouds… There’s a limit to how audacious you can be, you know,” another voice says. It rings, like bells, clear and beautiful. The girl appears from the kitchen, and she remembers her from yesterday: blonde hair, wings of light, a phantom’s grace.

She tells them she’s sorry. Whatever half-words come out of her throat, her face carries the message.

The blonde girl laughs again, not unkindly. “Well, it was an amusing diversion, so I can forgive it this time. My name is Hime, just in case you forgot.”

“I’m Suguri. This is our home,” the grey-haired girl explains. Suguri. An important name.

“Be careful of this one,” Hime says, folding herself into a wicker chair a few feet away. “She collects blondes.”

“...A pervert?”

Suguri rolls her eyes. “One is not a collection. Hime likes to tease.”

It feels like an understatement. The war was full of them, things commanders said that soldiers had to translate. ‘Strong enemy presence’: a smaller war has broken out. ‘Some risk of injury’: you will almost certainly have less limbs at the day’s end. ‘We will provide long range support’: we’ll be coating the sky with missiles; please dodge them.

“Anyway… the world is different now. We don’t want you to feel lost. Or alone. We talked it over, and we’d like you to stay with us for a while. As long as you’d like,” Suguri says, and then adds, as an afterthought: “You can say no.”

“Although I, for one, would love it if you said yes,” Hime chimes in. “Suguri said you can have the beanbag, and I can come up and share the bed.”

Suguri’s eyes roll again; a quick flick skyward. “I’m installing a pillow wall, of course.”

Hime says nothing, but her eyes betray a sparkling grin. All walls must fall, in time.

“You’re… so lively,” Sora says. She takes another sip of cocoa, and tastes the chocolate this time. She almost feels like laughing. She hasn’t laughed in a long while.

“…Anyway, think it over. You can do what you like. We won’t order you around,” Suguri murmurs, and stands up. Her posture is a little rigid. Restrained.

“Wait.”

For all her strength – for all that they called her the ‘ultimate weapon’ – the most Sora can manage is to catch Suguri’s sleeve.

“…The war is over. The world is safe. What am I to do?”

Suguri turns, and her motion is quicker, more fluid; it’s as though a dam has broken. Before she can protest, Sora finds herself being folded into a hug.

“I can’t answer that,” Suguri says, her fingers drifting through the tangle of Sora’s hair. “It isn’t my answer to give. Just live. Look around this peaceful planet. You’ll find something. I promise.”

Sora doesn’t answer. She closes her eyes. No, she thinks. Despite their looks, despite their power, the difference between her and Suguri is like night and day. She was a soldier. She could never hug somebody like Suguri can. She doesn’t have that kind of strength.

The world begins to blur at the edges, warm and comfortable, and she feels sleep stealing into her, filling the hollowness of her bones. She’s never slept on a beanbag before. Probably better than the bunks she’s used to.

With that thought on her mind, wrapped in a friend’s embrace, she begins her first dream in a wide and warless world.


	8. Exercise

The air was thick and still. They faced each other across an open field, blades of grass rigid with frost. No mud. Firm enough footing to lunge across the clearing in one shot. The battlefield was marked by posts strung together with rickety chain, chewed by age. Empty, but for them.

A training exercise, they called it. Physiotherapy. Stretching arms and legs that had slept for centuries, cajoling them back into fitness. It was Hime’s idea. Sora had shown no reaction, looked around with green eyes that were wide, and blank, like an animal’s. Her eyes were narrowed now, but calm. Waiting for a movement, a moment. A predator’s eyes – no, not a predator. A soldier’s.

Suguri settled into a defensive stance. They’d decided on wooden swords, this time – they could take more punishment than that, but why tempt fate? The blade was longer than she was used to. Heavier. She wondered how well she’d fare with her short arms. She was hit with a sudden envy for Sora, for the extra few inches she had in height, the extra weight. Little differences like that could be decisive.

Sora moved. The slightest possible shift of her leading foot. The sound was tiny, but there; a feint. Suguri prided herself on her speed, but Sora was fast too. If the blonde haired girl decided to bridge the gap, she’d reach Suguri long before the sound did. Harder, too. Even heavy, sturdy swords like theirs would only last for a hit or two. Better make them count.

Stillness was difficult. Landbound fights were difficult. Suguri was used to the air, the freedom of motion. A 360 degree battlefield. On land, you couldn’t dip under or over somebody, or circle around to the back quicker than they could follow. It was oddly two dimensional. Her body ached for motion, for a release of tension; her muscles felt like coiled springs, straining under the weight of their energy. She pondered beginning her attack. Sora was heavier, stockier, more apt for defence. As a soldier, she’d probably play to her strengths and punish an ill-judged attack. But Suguri’s speed was nothing to be sniffed at. If she could surge forward, provoke the counter and then dodge, it’d be her victory without a doubt.

As if sensing her resolution, Sora launched forward. Blades of frosted grass flew at her feet, clods of mud blown clear by the power of the motion. For a fraction of a second, Suguri registered wide, shining green eyes, a nose crinkled into a snarl, before moving to the important things: Sora’s right arm, the sword in her hand, lifted up high for a vertical strike, left hand drawn across her chest for balance and protection. Too quick to dodge. Suguri braced, set her heels back and held her sword horizontally across her body, slightly slanted. Too straight and the sword would break, hard; she wanted the force to roll across the blade.

There was a flicker of motion, and Sora’s posture changed. It was like watching a video with frames of animation removed; one moment her arm was in the air, the next it was curled back at her shoulder, quivering with suppressed force. Her arm shot out like a cobra, into a thrust that shot under Suguri’s guard and bit the empty air above her shoulder. Suguri realised her mistake and tightened her grip on the sword, but too late. In a single, practised gesture, Sora’s right arm jerked back and sent the tip of Suguri’s sword careening into the empty air, her left hand shooting forward to catch her jacket near the neck as the silver-haired girl tried to pivot away from the attack. There was no time to even panic before Sora’s right hand cracked down again, once, twice, the butt of her sword pounding against Suguri’s head like a drum. The world exploded into stars and Suguri felt her knees give way, Sora’s grip at her neck loosening. She fell, and Sora’s knee was there to meet her when she did, a quick sharp stab at her stomach, as bad as a knife. It kept her upright for just long enough for the sword to crack down again, and this time she met the floor with a crash, her ribs aching, her head swimming. She saw Sora’s leg move, winding up for a kick, and tried to roll out of the way.

It wasn’t enough, but it wasn’t necessary. Before the kick could come, a black iron chain shot towards Sora’s other ankle and jerked her leg out under from her. She hit the ground face-first with a thump.

“That’s enough of that, I should think!” Hime said sharply, from her seat atop the rickety fence. “Goodness me. When I said you should practice your swordplay, I rather thought you’d be fencing rather than just hitting each other.”

Suguri groaned. She felt justified in groaning. She felt even more justified in asking Hime to be the judge of the contest. She had had a feeling something like this would happen. Sora looked at her, her green eyes blank and unassuming again. Her expression was absolutely nonplussed.

“That was how we did it… in my time. On land, at least. Knock them over, draw your gun and shoot them. They made us practice with shovels,” Sora said, climbing to her feet.

“…I’m glad I wasn’t on the opposite side to you,” Suguri replied.

“Yes, well. If you could perhaps _not_ kill your friends out of force of habit, that would be nice. We shall just have to try something else, I suppose,” Hime said, sighing. “Was it good exercise, at least?”

“No. I just ran across a field and hit somebody,” Sora said.

“There’s such a thing as brutal honesty,” Suguri grumbled. She felt vaguely insulted, but couldn’t disagree with the assessment.

“Oh, cheer up. I’ll kiss it better later,” Hime teased, and ruffled her hair. Suguri rolled her eyes. “I suggest we retire for some cocoa and a brainstorming session.”

Suguri sighed, and made to follow her. Today had driven home that, rusty or not, Sora really was from a different era. A different world. The way she fought was more efficient, and brutal, than either Suguri or Hime could muster. What would have happened if Shifu had had somebody like Sora on his side, those many moons ago?

“Hey.”

Suguri felt a hand catch her sleeve. Sora’s hand. She turned to look at her newest friend, and found her face inscrutable as always. She always seemed so placid, like a cloud aimlessly floating across the horizon. If Suguri had to guess, though, she was probably going to make an apology for being so forceful.

Silently, tentatively, Sora put her hand on Suguri’s head and gently ruffled her silver hair. A contented, peaceful smile spread across her face. For the second time in as many minutes, Suguri sighed.

Close enough.


	9. Awkward (I)

_Art by Coffgirl (<https://twitter.com/CoffgirlDAZE>)_

* * *

 

Sora was not ‘lost’. That would imply that she, one of the finest soldiers of the greatest war ever known, did not have a sense of direction, which would be a very dangerous implication to make. She just didn’t know where she was, or where she was going. It was an entirely different thing. 

Hime had sent her out with a list of things to pick up from town. She hadn’t specified which town, of course. Or even which country. Not that Sora could have told the countries apart, anyway. Things had changed since she had last explored the world, and she hadn’t had a great chance to take in the sights even then. She’d been too busy getting shot at. What Sora did know was that Hime was quite fed up with trying to eat scoops of ice cream out of a coffee cup, and wanted some cutlery. She also knew that Suguri could not be trusted to buy cutlery at all; the grey haired girl had been sent out twice earlier that week in search of proper tableware, and had come back with pockets full of things that were ‘close enough’, in her opinion. Evidently, Suguri had dangerous opinions, because in her world a fork was the same as a spoon and one-and-a-half castanets was dinnerware for the entire family.

Still, since Sora was absolutely Not Lost and had in fact never been lost in her entire life, she thought she might take some time to explore. She had at least found  _a_  town, which was a good start. It had knobbly, cobbled streets, the kind so old that they were out of fashion even before the war began, and the shops all had puns in the name – terrible puns, it had to be said. Sora felt like every shop owner had been given a Christmas cracker joke and been told to get on with it. Every few paces there was a wrought iron lamppost. It was oddly comforting.

She had just finished walking along the High Street (which was the lowest point in town) and turned onto Eastgate (probably east, definitely not a gate) when something in a shop window caught her eye. Sora had never been one for window shopping. She just moved to her objective, completed it, and repeated until she could return home. Part of her realised that it wasn’t actually her that did it; it was a mindset, brewed in the military. One more way that the war had followed her into the future. It would take time to break it, but she had time. More than enough.

She drifted along, wondering if the roll of notes Hime had given her would stretch to lunch. She’d already walked past five vendors hawking street food, and been tempted by every one; there was something about sizzling onions that called to her on a deep spiritual level. It amazed her that there was food from so many cultures, all collected in one place – it felt like the boundaries she had grown up with, the hate that existed between people, had loosened so much. Before, she could never have imagined being able to buy pad thai, falafel and paella within mere feet of each other.

“You look hungry,” a voice said from behind her left shoulder. Deep, feminine, but a little rough. One of the sellers, perhaps. “Sora.”

Not one of the sellers. Not somebody who should know her name. Her muscles tightened, her hands curled into fists of their own accord. She’d had her guard down, she realised. Been lulled into a sense of security by this peaceful place. She pivoted, eyes flashing, to face the speaker.

There was no weapon being pointed at her. No body armour in sight. No comforting hum from a personal shield. A non-combatant. With that established, the details began to pop out at her: a loose white peasant shirt reined in by a cropped navy jacket, the arms hanging empty by the sides. A skirt long enough to trail across the cobbled streets. Blue-grey hair, blue eyes. A familiar face.

“Nath,” she breathed.

“Oh? You recognise me. Unexpected. Ah. I’m not here to fight. I would show you my hands so you can see I don’t have a weapon, but… Well, that’s not a concern,” she said, and grinned almost sheepishly: the face of a woman who’d made a bad joke, and knew it. “Let’s have some tea. My treat.”

* * *

 “I thought everything from the world before was gone.”

The tea room was very quaint. Hime would have loved it. Clotted cream, scones and red chequered tablecloths seemed to sprout from every surface. In the corner there was a great, leathery armchair with a night-table and a stack of thick books next to it. Every time the door opened – not constant, but often enough – a bell tinkled to announce the new arrival. Nath had ordered them a plate of biscuits, and a pot of tea; true to her word, she didn’t ask for any money.

“So did I. Bits and pieces turn up, from time to time,” Nath replied. “Could you pour?”

Sora nodded, and took the pot. Her hands didn’t tremble, although she was a little nervous.

“I didn’t die after our fight. That’s the silver lining, of being like me. They just… picked up what was left, and put me back together again. As easy as that,” Nath carried on, lightly. “A few little things went missing. They called me Humpty Dumpty for a while.”

“Really?”

“No.”

Sora raised an eyebrow. She’d never met somebody who could tell a joke and yet remain utterly, uncompromisingly serious. When Suguri or Hime told one, their eyes would light up, the corners of their mouths would twitch. You laughed, and then they would laugh, and everybody would smile. With Nath, it was like she was just going through the motions of a joke without really understanding what they were for. Like somebody had told her to do it one day, and she’d never stopped.

“…Are any of the others still around?” Sora asked. The question seemed to burn on the way through her throat, and when she finished, she could feel a strange, empty dread settle where it had been. Was she scared that nothing else had survived of the world she knew? Or scared that old enemies still remained to haunt her? She didn’t honestly know.

“Maybe. I hear rumours, now and again. I don’t follow up on them.”

A non-answer. It was enough, for now. Sora breathed deeply, let the smell of Earl Grey hit her airways. It was nothing like tea she used to see the soldiers drinking, the stuff they brewed overnight in tins and that was bitter enough to make you vomit if you drank it too fast.

“How are you going to drink that?” she asked, pointing towards Nath’s teacup.

“...You aren’t going to help me?” Nath asked, blinking. Absolutely serious.

A moment passed. “That… was a joke?” Sora tried.

“Yes. Watch.”

Nath seemed to close her eyes in concentration, and something moved in one of the long, billowy sleeves of her shirt. Sora realised then why the arms weren’t tied at the wrists, as they usually were for people lacking limbs; a bit quietly floated out of the cuff, and began to zip around the table.

“Old world technology. Still works, mostly,” Nath said, as the bit hovered around her teacup. It shot out a green ray that Sora immediately recognised as a tractor beam, one of the last big jumps of technology in the war. It was impressive that they had miniaturised it so far.

“You didn’t get prosthetics?”

“I did. But they wore out, and there were no parts to replace them. Some technology has come backwards after all this time. Not too many people get their arms blown off anymore, so the new stuff is a lot worse.” The teacup hovered level to her mouth, and she took a sip. “I heard you were dead, by the way.”

Sora said nothing. It wasn’t as though the assumption was necessarily wrong. If somebody stopped moving, you called them dead, didn’t you? She had just happened to wake up again, millennia later. An easy mistake to make.

“I was asleep,” she said, finally. “For years, and years.”

Nath’s eyebrow raised the slightest fraction of an inch, but she didn’t pursue the question. Instead she took a biscuit and began to nibble it daintily, as if showing off the control she had over her bits.

“I wondered, you know. If I was the only one having difficulty adjusting. Have you noticed? In this world, even the serious people smile and joke all the time. I tell jokes, and nobody laughs. I can’t get used to it,” she said, looking away from Sora’s face. A troubled expression flickered through her eyes. “Do you ever feel that?” 

Sora nodded. Hime never seemed to stop teasing; she was always ready with a quip and a dry smirk. Even Suguri, who rarely laughed outright, always seemed to be warm and approachable, a smile in her eyes if not on her face. It was difficult to talk to them, sometimes. The silence was too big.

“What were you doing before I stopped you, by the way?” Nath asked.

“Buying spoons,” Sora replied, without a hint of irony.

“...You slept for years on end, and then you wake up to buy spoons? How mysterious,” Nath said, and her mouth creased into a smile despite itself. “Look for Market Street, on the other side of town.”

“I see,” Sora said, and stood up. “Thank you for the tea. And the directions. I should proceed to the objective now.”

“Mm. I don’t suppose we’ll meet again. Maybe that’s for the better. But it was good to talk to you, Sora. I didn’t think I would ever get the chance.”

Sora looked at Nath, then; saw her rounded shoulders, the wistfulness creeping across her face. She wanted to say something, but the air was heavy, and she didn’t know the words. What would Hime do in this situation, she wondered? She pictured her new friend, the impish grin, the assured way she went about everything, and she was struck with an idea so stupid that she had to act on it before she thought about it too hard.

Leaving herself no time for doubts, she lunged across the table towards Nath and shot a hand towards her face. Nath flinched, but too slowly; Sora’s fingertips brushed against her cool skin.

“Nath,” Sora said, holding up her thumb. “I have your nose.”

“...what?”

Sora wiggled her thumb, tauntingly. “If you want it back, you have to come and find me.”

Nath looked at her, dumbfounded. Then, she coughed: a cough that rolled itself into a low chuckle that sprang from the very pit of her stomach.

“You must be the strangest ultimate weapon I’ve ever met,” she gasped, her eyes crinkled at the edges. “Very well. I’ll find you and reclaim my nose some other day.”

“I’ll make some tea for you when you do. I’ll use my new spoons,” the blonde girl replied, grinning. Then she turned on her heel and left, still holding her thumb above her head.

Nath didn’t reply. She was too busy chuckling to herself. What kind of world was she living in, where two women who’d tried their very best to kill each other could turn around and drink tea, and play childish jokes on each other? A better one than when they’d first met, she decided. Better by far.

“Excuse me… Are you alright?” one of the waitresses said, passing by. She was young, much shorter than Nath was. Not sure how to deal with this strange, armless woman, chuckling to herself in a tea-room.

“Ah… Don’t worry about me,” Nath replied, with mirth still ringing in her voice. “I’m quite ‘armless.”

The waitress looked at her for a moment -- then slowly, uncertainly, began to laugh.


	10. Awkward (II)

It was morning in the Suguri household. Birds were singing, eggs were frying, and Hime was as close to dressed as she was going to get. Suguri had surprised her earlier in the week with a gloriously fluffy pink dressing gown; Hime had very quickly decided that an existence spent wrapped in luscious softness was better than the alternative, and resolved to wear it at all points in time.

Suguri herself was still very much asleep, draped diagonally over the bed. When they ‘acquired’ Sora, Hime had been banished from her bean-bag sleeping spot and installed in Suguri’s bed, with a pillow wall for propriety. She had quickly discovered that Suguri was a very mobile sleeper, who tossed and turned until she finally came to a rest, star-shaped, with her silvery hair fanned out underneath her. The pillow wall, it turned out, was a meaningless formality; one way or another, Hime usually woke up with her friend snoozing on top of her.

Sora, on the other hand, was as still as a mountain when she slept. Whatever position she was in when she dropped off she would keep, and she occasionally settled in some very odd positions. Currently, she was kneeling on the floor with her head thrust face-first into the pillowy centre of her beanbag, snoring soundly. For the first few mornings after she arrived, Hime had tiptoed around her when making breakfast, but it soon became apparent that Sora woke up when she was good and ready, and no amount of noise or prodding would get her up any sooner.

The eggs were just about ready to be dumped out onto plates and married with thick, toasted bread when a knock came at the front door. Perhaps ‘knock’ was overly generous; it was more of a thump, which seemed to reverberate around the walls of the entire house. For a moment, Hime thought it might have been a visit from the postman, which to her was akin to being visited by the stork. It simply never happened. They lived too far off the beaten path, and whatever authorities were in their district were either friends of Suguri’s or were smart enough not to bother her.

“Yes, yes! I’m coming. You don’t need to kick the door down,” she called as she plated up breakfast and trotted through the living room, lightly balancing Sora’s plate on her back as she passed. Sora continued to snore, no doubt exploring the mysterious space inside her own head.

Hime didn’t know what she had been expecting when she opened the door. A lost traveller, perhaps, whose car broken down on the road, with whom she would embark on a wonderful adventure into the world of automobile repair, or potentially a misguided religious missionary who, like a sunflower turning its face towards the sun, would gratefully drink in her attention. She hadn’t been expecting Nath.

“I apologise for kicking your door,” Nath said. She had, unintentionally, begun to loom. She was tall, and habitually stood with her back perfectly straight, a look of careful neutrality stuck like glue to her features; looming was something of an occupational hazard for her.

Luckily, Hime was not a girl to be loomed at. She looked up at Nath’s impassive face, at her armless shoulders, and favoured her with a glittering smile. “I suppose I can forgive you, this once. Do you need a hand? Or two, as the case may be?”

Nath blinked. The number of people in the world who were brave enough to steal her joke right in front of her was very low. “I’m looking for Sora,” she said. Then, after a pause: “She has my nose.”

“I… see. Well, you’re certainly missing something, but your nose is still very much attached, as far as I can tell. I suppose I’m not an expert on the matter, though. How do you two know each other?”

Nath found herself caught between conflicting emotions. On some level, she realised that this was how other people felt when she made jokes about her limb deficiencies: they didn’t know quite how to respond to the joke. But on the other hand, she couldn’t help but like somebody as charming, fearless, and therefore dangerous, as Hime was proving herself to be.

“We tried to kill each other ten thousand years ago. Then we met again the other week. I told her where to find spoons. She stole my nose.”

Hime nodded, wondering privately if everybody from the past used the same strange type of dream-logic that Sora and Nath seemed to function on. “I see. She is here, but she’s asleep at the moment.”

“When are you expecting her to wake up? This year, or later?” Nath asked, concern worming its way onto her face.

“Well, I was rather hoping she’d be awake in the next ten minutes, or her else her breakfast will get cold.”

“Acceptable.” She paused. “I’m Nath.”

“Nice to meet you. I’m Hime,” the blonde said, her smile still sparkling. “Tell me, Nath. If I were to – on a whim – poke your cheeks right now, would you be able to do anything about it?”

“I suppose I couldn’t stop you,” Nath replied, her eyes narrowing, “but I might hurt you afterwards.”

“Hmhmhm. You might _try_. Come in, some in,” she said, beckoning with her hand. “We have eggs and toast and cocoa, the breakfast of gods.”

Inside, Nath found the house as confusing as she had found Hime. There was a barstool upside down on the kitchen table. A wicker chair had been colonised by some strange, fabric monster nested in the corner of the room. There was what appeared to be half a door with a table leg glued on, resting by near the kitchen; Nath assumed it had led to the pantry, but had been replaced with a bookcase on rollers. On closer inspection, the books contained seemed to be split evenly between the subjects of pirates and baking.

From deep within the heart of her beanbag, Sora moaned. “Himeeeeeeee. There’s something on my back.”

“Oh, you’re awake! Good morning, Sora. It’s a plate of food. How will you get yourself out of this predicament with your breakfast intact, I wonder?” Hime teased cheerfully.

“Uuuuuuuuuu.”

Nath watched incredulously as Sora began, slowly and carefully, to shimmy the plate down the length of her own back, until it was perched neatly on her bottom. With a quick jerk of her hips, she sent it skyward; then, like a cat righting itself in the middle of a fall, she flipped herself over and shot her hands up to catch the plate before any of the precious breakfast had left it. “Safe.”

“Bravo,” Hime said, and threw a knife and fork at her underarm. Sora plucked them out of the air with barely a thought, and began to munch on some toast. “You have a guest, by the way.”

Nath stepped forward, considerably less sure of herself than she was. She had intended to drop by, ascertain Sora’s location, engage in a little small talk about times past and then leave the girl to her own devices; still, she clung resolutely to her excuse for being there. “I have come to take my nose back.”

Sora stood up and looked at her. There was a peaceful smile on her face, but Nath had no idea what was going on inside her head. Her eyes gave no indication; they were like black holes that sucked in logic and spat out mystery. After a moment of thought, she held out a bite of fried egg on her fork. “Ahhhhhh.”

“Wh...ah. No thank you.”

Sora gestured impatiently with the fork. “Yes.”

“No.”

A moment’s pause. “I’ll wrestle you.”

“…Ugh. Fine,” Nath said, and rolled her eyes. Sora gently pressed the fork to her lips.

“Good?” Sora asked as Nath began to chew.

“Ish good,” Nath mumbled, grudgingly. She fought the urge to blush.

“My goodness,” Hime giggled. “That was _magical_. It was like seeing a unicorn.”

Nath had a glare that could weld steel girders, and she focused it directly on Hime’s forehead. Hime continued to smile, utterly unfazed. Meanwhile, Sora held out another bite of egg on the fork. “This is getting out of hand,” she muttered.

Her saviour came in the form of slippers on the stairs, an incomprehensible mumbling that came down from on high. Suguri had descended, warm and happy, one foot in the waking world and one still in the world of blissful sleep. She peered around the living room with bleary, half-closed eyes; details were lovely, but they could wait. Important things needed her attention, and one thing was more important than the rest.

“Hug.”

Nath watched, dumbstruck, as a silver-haired girl she didn’t know shuffled towards her, arms outstretched. Nothing that had happened today had made _any_ sense. Hime wasn’t afraid of her – her, a former ultimate weapon. Sora operated on strange rules that were never explained. Now she was going to be the victim of an arbitrary hug attack. Luckily, Sora stepped forward to intercept her assailant. Gently, but firmly, the blonde-haired soldier turned Suguri around until she was pointing in Hime’s direction, and set her loose.

“Fluffy,” Suguri mumbled as she collapsed into her morning hug.

“Yes, yes,” Hime replied, nuzzling the top of her friend’s head. “You know, I sometimes wonder if you bought this dressing gown for my benefit, or for yours.”

Nath looked at Sora, who had long hair and made no sense to her, and at Suguri, who had long hair and made no sense to her, and then at Hime, who seemed to be thoroughly enjoying herself. “You have two of them?” she asked.

“For my sins.”

“It’s as if you collect girls with long hair,” Nath remarked coolly.

“It’s not that I collect girls with long hair. It’s that this one collects blondes,” Hime chuckled, motioning at the girl in her arms. “Or perhaps Sora is collecting the world’s strongest women?”

Sora neither confirmed or denied it, which raised a lot of possibilities that didn’t bear thinking about. Instead, she turned to Nath. “Are you okay? You look confused.”

Nath frowned, and tried to marshal her words in a way that wouldn’t ignite a conflict. “Well… I do find the situation a little disarming,” she said. Suguri snorted. Good. It was enough. “I came because you invited me, but I don’t really know what I wanted. Other than my nose back, of course. I’m missing enough body parts.” This time, it was Hime’s turn to snort. “I… don’t really know how to react to this.”

Sora put a finger to her lips, allowing the words to turn over in her head. “Maybe you wanted to talk about the war?”

“Maybe. But I also don’t want to talk about the war. Or think about it,” Nath frowned. “I don’t know. When I look at you, Sora, it’s so obvious that you’ve changed. But I don’t feel like I’ve changed at all.”

For another moment, Sora was silent. Then she brought her gaze level with Nath’s. Such green eyes. Deep, and unfathomable. Oceans, unexplored. Didn’t humans once believe that above the sky there was an ocean, the boundary of heaven? But they weren’t blank. They had been, in days gone past. “You make bad jokes. That’s one change.”

“One change in ten thousand years is fine for geology, but not for people,” Nath said ruefully. Her own eyes were still the same as they had been in the war. The view in the mirror had not changed.

Whether Nath was right or wrong, she didn’t get far in her thoughts. Sora crossed the room in two quick strides, quietly and without warning; one moment she was clutching a plate of breakfast, and the next she was throwing her arms around Nath’s shoulders, pulling her into a clumsy embrace. She was strong, and warm, and closer than anybody had dared to come for thousands of years.

“Nath. We should be friends,” Sora said, with the certainty that runs through dreams. “We didn’t get to be friends during the war. That can be change number two.”

Something deep inside Nath was trembling. Wobbling, like a top that had been spinning for far, far too long, supporting itself through momentum and nothing more. The feeling was terrifying. The future was terrifying. But it was inevitable, and inevitably, she fell.

“I suppose that is acceptable,” she said, and buried her face in Sora’s hair. She didn’t want Hime to see her expression. This moment was private, for them alone.

The hug lasted half a minute more before Sora’s arms slackened, and she set Nath free to muster some dignity. She turned towards Hime and Suguri, bubbling with excitement. “Suguri, Suguri. It worked. I hugged her and we’re friends now. It’s like magic.”

“Ahahaha… Sora, please don’t take Suguri as an example of how to make friends. Her methods are unique, shall we say,” Hime replied, although the look on her face made it clear she would have it no other way. She caught Nath’s eye, and brushed her hand over her mouth: _I shall say nothing, for now._

“Ahem. Well. I should probably go now. I have some errands to run,” Nath said, abruptly. She could feel the warm blood rushing to her cheeks. “We’ll meet again, Sora.”

“I still have your nose.”

“Keep it, for now. If I can get along without fingers, a missing nose should be fine,” Nath replied, rolling her eyes.

“We should meet at your house next time.”

“Although you’re more than welcome to visit us again,” Hime chimed in. “That said, it might be an idea to come later in the day next time. The house makes a little more sense in the afternoon.”

Nath shook her head, laughing. The idea that anything about this house could make sense seemed unlikely. Bookcase doors, breakfast acrobatics, green-eyed girls who didn’t say what they were thinking and left you to fill in the gaps. It was chaos, but a very peaceful kind of chaos. A smile played around her lips as she said, with what she realised was total honesty:

“I suppose I’ll get used to it.”


	11. Picnic

The warmth of the sun on tired bones, the clefts in the faces of mountains: Sora awoke with a hunger for them, for the beauty of nature in spite of the nature of man. So they left, wanderers for a night and a day, to seek the wide-open spaces of the world.

She picks Nath as her companion. A new friend to take in new sights. There is something they share, Sora feels, beyond their history – although she hasn’t quite decided what it is yet. Wounds, maybe. An outlook shaped by something bigger than either of them, bigger than anything the world has seen since. Perhaps a future, or part of one. Time will tell.

She winds her way through stands of silver-barked trees, feels her boots slide ever so slightly on the wet grass. She can tell that there was a path here once, that people have forgotten but the forest has not; the dirt is still hard, the branches conspicuously thin. The bushes around them are laden with blackberries, ripe and plump. She picks a few and pops them in her mouth, carelessly, dooms herself to live out the rest of the day with purple stains on her fingers, her lips. A small price. The fruit is sweet, and she scoops up a handful for their picnic hamper.

Nath follows behind her. She looks different, wrapped in a traveller’s overcoat, smaller and less serene; the sleeves, knotted at the end and dangling loosely, catch and snag on brambles and branches. Her tread is heavy but tireless, each stride the same distance, each motion perfectly consistent. Not a march, not today, but close enough.

Slowly and reluctantly, the trees thin and the branches part. The sky is still eggshell blue when they leave the forest. They’ve made good time. For a moment, Sora feels proud of herself. For a moment, she forgets that she wanted to experience the forest rather than travel through it. The moment passes, and a frown begins to tug at the corners of her mouth.

“You’ve stopped. Do you want to go back?” Nath asks. She has watched as Sora floated through the forest, a butterfly dancing between flowers – never stopping long enough, never settling, content to brush her fingertips against something and claim she knows it. There is something childish about her excitement, and disappointment.

“No,” Sora says, and shakes her head, although the crease still remains in her brow. “Let’s find somewhere for the picnic.”

Beyond the shade of the trees, the untended grass lengthens, little by little, until a single gust of wind sends a sweeping wave across the surface. Every so often there are divots and whorls, nests flattened out to fit the needs of tiny animals, and these Sora avoids respectfully. In the distance stands a lonely tree, separated from the forest, with a thick trunk full of knots and downy, drooping leaves. Sora thinks that it will make as fine a destination as any; she makes a beeline for it, quickening her stride, beckoning Nath with a flick of her wrist.

“This would be a nice place to nap,” she murmurs, half to herself and half to the tree, as if asking permission. She runs her fingers along the bark, feels the warm sun-soaked wood under the palm of her hand. The trunk is rougher than she imagined it being from the meadow’s edge, more irregular. Without the shelter of other trees, the hand of nature has sculpted it freely.

“It seems a shame to come all this way, just to sleep,” Nath says, drawing closer. She doesn’t get an answer. Sora has already put the picnic basket down and begun climbing, lifting herself up hand over hand as if she’s clambered up this tree a thousand times before. There is a place in the higher boughs where the branches connect and diverge, and she settles lightly in the terminal, cradled by the branches and the leaves.

“Nath, come up. It’s good,” she calls.

“Climbing isn’t my strong suit,” Nath calls back wryly. “No finger strength.”

A rustle, and Sora’s face is peering down at her again from the leaves. “You can fly. I didn’t because it’s cheating, but you’re allowed.”

“It wouldn’t take my weight,” Nath says, and steps on a fallen branch. It cracks under the strain of her.

For perhaps the first time, Sora realises that Nath’s legacy as a weapon goes further than a lack of arms, than want of a smile. Her skin is warm but she is steel underneath, and her bones were crafted long ago by men who had grown prideful of their skill. _If I had been born a few years later_ , Sora thinks, _I would be that, too._

Nath can do many things. Sora knows this; it would be wrong to pity her, to see her as an invalid. But there are many things she cannot do, things that were taken from her and cannot be returned, a price for power in a war that should never have been, and for a moment Sora feels the weight of all those things settle on her shoulders. Quietly, she slithers down the trunk of the tree again.

“Sorry.”

Nath’s voice is sheepish, uncertain somehow. She’s trying to work out what she’s apologising for, what she would have seen if she had been able to climb up those branches with Sora and nestle in the hollow that nature made for them. The silence wears on, and she doesn’t know how to fill it, doesn’t know if it’s a silence that can be allowed to continue.

“There are just some things I can’t do.”

“It’s okay,” Sora says, and her voice is a mixture of things: irritation and sadness, leavened with whimsy. “Give me a piggyback ride instead then.”

Nath gives her a look, and wonders if she’s being made fun of. “I can’t. I don’t have arms to pick you up with.”

“You don’t need them,” Sora says, and pats her hand against the bark of the tree. “You’re strong, so I can climb you.”

“You’ll fall off.”

“I’ll hold tight.”

Sora’s expression says that the matter is settled; the force of will that brought her through the war is shining in her eyes, carrying her along like an ocean current. Nath sighs, faintly exasperated but content, and straightens her back. The skin of her neck tingles when Sora drapes her arms around it; she feels her stomach tighten as Sora tightly curls her legs around her waist.

“I told you so,” Sora says, her breath whispering against Nath’s ear. She settles her head on the tall girl’s shoulder, lets her hair brush against her friend’s cheek. “Do you see over there, those flowers where the butterflies are? Let’s go there next.”

“What about the picnic basket?” Nath asks. Her voice is low, and quiet, but not unhappy. Far from unhappy.

“We can come back for it later. For now, let’s go.”

Nath begins to walk, in her loping, tireless step – each stride the same distance, each motion perfectly the same. She is just as fast with her passenger as without her. Her tired bones bathe in golden sunshine, and her burden is as light as the sky.


	12. Private Dinner

Her belly is full and her glass not yet empty, a problem she solves with relish. She lets the tastes of the wine dance across her tongue, and enjoys them as they last; she has drunk two glasses tonight, and will allow herself no more this week. In the days after the war, she found drink too strong a temptation, too inviting a pleasure, and there are still small spaces inside of her where the thirst for it lurks, unappeased even by the passage of time.

It is easier to relax in her own home. She has had many homes and many houses over the years, but her taste is for apartments. Small enough not to be lonely, big enough for all her needs. A pocket of the world carved out for her. She couldn’t imagine doing what Suguri did for so long, living alone in such a big house. Opulent it isn’t, but the lacquered floorboards, the plush rugs, the cushions on which she sits and eats each night – they are hers, and soothe her soul.

“Is it really that good?” Sora asks, from a cushion not so very far away. She sits with her legs folded under her, slight and formal. A military habit. Her own glass is full, but for a sip; that was enough to keep her coughing, to wrinkle her nose, and she left the rest alone.

“It isn’t the best wine,” she says, sitting up a little. She has grown too relaxed, she feels, and begun to sprawl out on her cushion like she does when she’s alone. “I used to live near the ruins of some of the old vineyards… destroyed during the war, of course, but every so often somebody would find an intact cellar, and the vintages were phenomenal. A lot of the old knowledge was lost for a while… but this wine isn’t so bad. It’s very lively.”

Sora nods, her eyes luminous with naked curiosity. Tonight it feels as though she has had little but. At first, Nath felt her skin prickle uncomfortably as Sora watched her and the way she did daily tasks with her feet, but there is no malice there, and no judgement. There’s something very childish about the way she watches, and yet she has the long, graceful limbs of an adult; Nath supposes it is Suguri and Hime’s influence. The ancients, it seems, are always the most childish.

“Ah, sorry. I’m rambling. Don’t feel bad – you gave it a chance, which is the important thing. Could you help me with the plates?”

Immediately Sora unfolds herself and scoops up the dinnerware, her movements rigid and efficient. In her heart, she is still the warrior who fought war itself and won, but Nath wonders how much she lost during those long, long years asleep. Her skin is so much paler now, and there is an elven cast to her arms and legs where once there was solid muscle. A fearsome power still lurks inside her, but the implacable strength of the past is gone.

She is, though, an enthusiastic helper. Although Nath has had many years to practice doing things without hands, there are still some tasks she finds bothersome, and cutting food is one of them. She’s never known it to be any different, but with Sora around an arduous chore becomes as easy as showing her where the knife is.

“Hime taught me,” Sora had said as she worked, her left hand pinning a carrot to the worktop, her right hand bringing down the heel of the blade. “I do the chopping most days. Hime cuts herself sometimes, but I don’t.”

The image of Hime with a bandaged finger doesn’t come easily; it seems to belong in a different world. To Nath, Hime has always seemed infuriating in control, breezing past any difficulty with a smile, so it’s odd to picture her actually having trouble with something. But it seems there are many things that she struggles with behind closed doors.

“Thank you for cooking for me,” Sora says as she returns. “It was very good.”

“Really? I bet it was half-cold by the time you were done watching me eat,” Nath jokes. Her voice is warm, honeyed by the alcohol.

“That was very good too. I had never seen somebody use a fork with their feet.”

“It’s not that hard when you get used to it. Don’t ask me to use chopsticks, though,” she replies, and wriggles her toes.

It earns her a chuckle, a little bubble of laughter, precious for its rarity. Sora does not laugh freely, or easily, and always seems vaguely surprised whenever one escapes her. She allows herself to look around the room a little before returning; her eyes linger over the bookshelves, her lips silently mouthing words that Nath can’t make out.

“Do you read these?” she asks, running her fingers along a leather-bound spine.

“Honestly, no,” Nath replies, a little sheepish. She has returned to her cushion; she feels sleepy, perhaps because of the wine. “Most of my library is digital. It’s easier. Books are easy to damage. But I like being around them. They’re from an older world. Most of those books I scavenged.”

Sora doesn’t speak for a moment, lost in her own thoughts. “But you can read?”

“What kind of question is that?” Nath asks. The words have barely escaped her lips before she realises they were the wrong ones. The still, relaxed atmosphere of two friends enjoying dinner is suddenly replaced by something more taught, more clinging.

“I understand when people speak. Mostly,” Sora says, slowly, approaching things from a different angle. “They taught me languages, before the war. So I’d know what the enemy was saying. This language… is descended. From those ones. So I can figure it out. Suguri helps. Her accent is old, so it’s closer to the ones I knew. But the alphabet changed. I can’t read it.”

Nath’s mouth opens, closes again. Of course. She has had ten thousand years to travel the world, to drink wine and rescue books she doesn’t read. But for Sora, those years don’t exist; they are sleep, a great yawning void in the history of her world. How much has the language changed from when she fell? How different is the landscape, the cities and the coasts? When they met again, Sora had been lost. Lost, unable to read the street names, to navigate with a map, in a city that hadn’t existed until she woke.

And when she speaks, there is always a deliberateness, a slowness to it. A moment where it feels like the gears in her head are whirring, before she spits out her result. Nath realises, quietly, that she has barely ever heard Sora use anything but simple words. Well-picked, but simple. How large is the gulf between what Sora feels and what she can express? There are so many questions Nath wants to ask, but how equipped is her friend to answer them?

“Nath,” Sora says, and pads over to her. Her feet are bare; she took off her shoes when she came in, despite Nath telling her she didn’t have to. Despite herself, all Nath can do is look at them; she cannot look her friend in the eye, after being so insensitive, after not realising despite the clues. “Don’t worry.”

She feels Sora’s gently touch her head, ruffle her hair a little, and despite herself she is cheered. Of course. Just because she doesn’t have hands doesn’t mean she can’t cook, or read books, or whatever else she wants to do; just because Sora is struggling with the language doesn’t mean they can’t communicate. They just do it a little differently from other people. That’s all.

“Thank you for dinner. You don’t talk about yourself a lot, so it’s interesting when you do. Tell me more about the places you lived next time,” Sora says. Her voice is dreamy and relaxed. “I want to hear what happened in the world while I was away.”

“Mm. I do have some history books. We can read them together next time. You do the pages, and I’ll do the words. I’ll teach you as we go along. Deal?”

“Deal.”

Nath says nothing, but pushes her head against Sora’s hand a little. It’s just an impulse, but Sora takes the hint and drops to one knee to gently hug Nath’s head into her chest.

“Sorry. I’m sleepy. I think I drank too much.”

“Should I go?” Sora asks.

“No.”

“If you say so.”

Nath wonders, as the seconds tick by, if it is the wine that is making her feel so warm, or that is bringing the blood rushing to her cheeks. In her heart of hearts, she knows it isn’t. But if the more she believes it, the less she is embarrassed, and the longer this moment can last. Perhaps she _did_ drink too much tonight.

But her thirst is for something different.


	13. War and Peace

It was half past two in the afternoon, and the newspaper had not arrived.

This was a state of affairs that Suguri found deeply concerning. Her house, admittedly, was far from the nearest city, but the newspaper man was very reliable. She remembered when he was a fresh-faced youngster on a barely functional moped, given the unenviable task of navigating the nascent countryside roads to Suguri’s abode – a task he sometimes failed but always attempted. As the years had gone by, he had expanded until he could fit three Suguris (Sugurii? Sugurae? She was never entirely sure how you would refer to multiple clones of herself, or why you would want them) inside himself, and upgraded from his moped into a sleek and shiny van; selfishly, she dreaded the day when he died or was replaced and their newspaper acquisition rate became spotty once more.

It bothered her because the number one reason for their newspaper not arriving would be that something very serious had happened in the outside world – which was the exact situation in which she would most want to read the newspaper. It was a vicious cycle made up of sadness and ignorance, both on the list of her pet peeves – somewhere above obfuscation by civil servants, but below leaving cartons of milk in the fridge without any milk in them, which Hime regularly did. (She was opposed to it not because of convenience, but because an empty carton of milk had been robbed of its purpose and therefore was a very sad object, philosophically speaking. Hime contended that she was giving them a new lease of life as oxygen storage devices.)

Disquieted by the lack of vaguely biased broadsheet political commentary in her life, Suguri decided that the first thing to do was establish whether her newspaper delivery man had been kidnapped by newspaper bandits, and, if so, rally her friends to distract them while she infiltrated their stronghold. Having been awake longest, Hime was the first point of call.

“Oh, Geoffry? He’s sick. They called us about it on the telephone. The telephone, Suguri! It’s the first time I’ve ever heard it ring, you know. I jumped out of my skin,” Hime told her conversationally. She was currently prodding at a saucepan of what, she assured Suguri, would be jam when it was finished. As it was, it was a goopy proto-jam that would have looked very sad on a piece of toast. “I asked Sora to pick one up while she’s out.”

“Sora is away?” Suguri asked. She couldn’t imagine that Sora had been abducted by newspaper bandits, although it still remained an outside possibility. What if they had bribed her with food, or kittens? Suguri could tell many a tale of curious maidens lead to their certain doom by baskets of adorable kittens. The curious maidens were always herself, and the kitten wrangler always got a big surprise after her doom turned out to be less certain than advertised.

“Yes. She and Nath went flower picking this morning. Well, Sora went flower picking. I think Nath went Sora-watching.”

Suguri thought for a moment, before remembering who Nath was. Nath slept at real-people hours, and always came and left before Suguri was awake. She vaguely recalled her being quite tall, blurry and in need of a hug, although that _might_ have been a palm tree. There was something very adorable about palm trees, when they weren’t trying to kill her by deliberately dropping coconuts on her head.

“I see,” she replied, because she was vaguely aware that Hime had said something that might demand a reaction. That was the problem she always had – whatever she was talking about just got lost in her rapidly advancing mental landscape.

Hime, however, was not a woman who allowed herself to be left behind, and immediately after she had taken her pan off the heat and ladled the still-gloopy jam into jars, she gave Suguri a quick bonk on the head with her wooden spoon.

“Suguri, you weren’t paying attention. It’s a bad habit, you know,” she said, sternly.

Suguri did not reply straight away, because the spoon had still had jam on it and the jam was in her hair. Her hair, that took her an hour to wash properly – a long, agonising, boring hour – had been contaminated by warm fruit goop.

“Hime, this is _awful_ ,” she said, and although it would would have been an exaggeration to say she had tears in her eyes, it wasn’t so very far from the truth.

Hime shrugged, although she pointedly did not relinquish her spoon and was therefore still a figure of immense danger. “Consider it divine punishment.”

While that was technically correct, Suguri was still very unhappy with the situation, and made no secret of it. “You have to help me wash this out later.”

“Ooh! Don’t mind if I do,” Hime giggled, and Suguri realised with a sinking heart that she had accidentally invited her best friend into the shower with her. Surely, though, she would take it as a joke. Surely. “But for now, I wanted to talk to you about those two.”

The silver-haired girl frowned. Was she being asked for an opinion? Probably. But what opinion was there to give? Sora was Sora, and Nath was Nath. Admittedly, she did rather enjoy Sora’s company; it was a change from Hime’s vivacity, which gave her time to relax and unwind. They sometimes went stargazing together. (Hime never joined them; she had seen quite enough stars in space, and was honestly a little sick of them. Perhaps, she said, in a few centuries, when she’d had chance to get nostalgic).

“Sora is plushy,” she said eventually.

Hime’s eyebrows knitted, and a frown flickered across her face. “Plushy? In which direction? Front or back?”

“…what?”

“If it’s front, don’t tell me. If it’s back, don’t tell her.” Hime thought for a second. “In fact, don’t tell either of us. It can be our little secret. Nobody needs to know.”

“...Good?” Suguri replied, slowly.

“Anyway, don’t you think they’re getting along well? _Suspiciously_ well? We’re talking about two women who have actively shot each other, but they go out and have fun together all the time!”

Suguri was hit with the dreadful knowledge that she was about to be sucked into a tangled social web, and instinctively took a step back. Hime immediately took a step forward, spoon very much still in hand. It seemed she wasn’t going to get out of this one without a fight.

“You and I have actively shot each other, and we get along.”

“Yes, but that’s _different_. It was a bonding experience. We both aimed away from the face.”

“In fact,” Suguri said, “now that I think of it, almost all of my friends have shot at me at some point.”

“Almost all of them missed, too,” Hime said wryly. “It just means you have an eclectic social circle.”

“Who all have guns.”

“Who all have guns! They provide a great talking point that we can all share.”

Suguri did not think that firearms were a particularly good method of promoting peace, love and friendship, but Hime appeared to have gotten distracted from her initial point. Alas, the illusion was only momentary; like a heat-seeking missile, she returned to her original target.

“All I’m saying,” she said, swishing her spoon with each word she spoke and splattering tiny globules of jam on the countertop, “is that _love_ might be in the air!”

She pronounced the last phrase with the air of somebody revealing the culprit at the end of a murder mystery. There was just the right amount of drama, a touch of flair, that devastating tone of certainty. All in all, she was proud of it – although, if she had perhaps paid better attention, she might have heard the point whistling as it it soared several nautical miles above Suguri’s head and vanished into the ether.

“Is that a problem?” Suguri asked, and Hime swore that the lone tuft of hair that stuck out from her head twitched a little. Her face fell, and so, too, did her jaw; she had been aware that her friend was a little dense in some areas, but this was like dealing with a social dwarf star. Sometimes, she wasn’t sure whether it was her or Suguri that was a literal space alien.

Suguri, for her part, watched her friend’s face flit through several complex emotions (irritation, despair, grim amusement) before she took a deep breath and calmed herself, a sure signal that she was about to quiet down and dim the glare of her inherent Hime-ness temporarily so that ordinary mortals could keep up.

“It’s not a _problem,_ ” Hime said carefully, her tone neutral (albeit a lively neutral). “But it’s exciting. I suppose I just wanted to gossip about it. When you live on an enclosed vessel, you know, full of maybe a few hundred people who just can’t get away from each other, where if you do something the entire ship knows about it an hour later, gossip just starts to be a fun pastime.”

Suguri frowned. “I’m bad at gossip.”

“I would never have guessed,” Hime replied, fondly. “But you have other very attractive qualities, so it’s alright. Next time I see Kyoko or Nana, though, they are in for some salacious details. Dirt shall be dished, my dear Suguri.”

The idea filled her with a strange sense of dread, but Hime seemed to have cheered back up, which was the main thing.

“Still, those two have bonded surprisingly quickly. Do all youngsters nowadays move this fast?”

Youngsters, Suguri thought, was a very relative term when everybody involved was over ten thousand years of age. That was leaving aside the whole issue of romantic tension, which, although she knew she was famously bad at detecting, she had felt none of. Still, it seemed like Hime had an itch to scratch, and although she might not be quite the right person to do it, the attempt had to be made.

“It’s probably the war,” she said.

Hime tilted her head. “Pardon?”

“The war,” Suguri repeated. “I don’t know if you’ve ever been in one, but… here on Earth, there’s been more than a few. Sora and Nath were in the last big one. They say that in times of war, people love more quickly and intensely, because they know it could be taken away from them at any time. Maybe they’re just going through that.”

She leaned against the counter top and let the thought sit in the air for a while. She was surprised when Hime put down her spoon and followed suit, a bizarrely satisfied look on her face.

“Thank you for humouring me,” she said, and gave Suguri’s hand a squeeze. “So, what you’re saying is that if I wanted to encourage two people to move things along more speedily, I should start a war?”

It was a joke, but there was something deeper hidden there. Suguri couldn’t quite figure out what it was, but she knew it was there. “Please don’t start a war in the name of love. I don’t want to have to fight you.”

“It would only be a _little_ war,” Hime giggled. “Besides, wouldn’t you be on my side?”

Suguri gave her hand a squeeze back. “Even if I’m fighting you, I am always on your side.”

The look of contentment on Hime’s face grew, and she let out a satisfied little sigh. “Well, I suppose that shall have to do. I believe I’ve taxed your social muscles enough for one day.”

Suguri smiled at her, and Hime smiled back, but their smiles were very different.

“Now,” Hime said, and her grip on Suguri’s hand tightened. “Shall we go up to the shower and get that jam out of your hair? I’ll be very gentle, I promise.

Suguri groaned. The conflict and the gossip were over. But it seemed a reprieve was far from sight.


	14. Books and Coffee

Nath sighs, and breathes deeply. The scent of roasted coffee is in the air, wafting through the cases upon cases of literature. It is difficult not to be still here, to fill her heart with quiet and let the hours move away from her; but she has company, and an objective. There is history to be learned, and letters to be taught.

“Do you think they’ll have books about the war?” Sora asks. She follows Nath through the stacks slowly, like a wary animal. Words upon words upon words, and she can’t read any of them. The weight of them seems to bear down upon her shoulders. How much knowledge is arrayed before her, there but foreign and unattainable? How many hours was spent writing these tomes, and how many lives were breathed into their pages?

“Hm. Perhaps. It’s not well known what happened in the immediate aftermath of the fighting. There was a lot of destruction. A lot of technology was lost, and what was left was no longer trusted. For a while, science was blamed for enabling mankind to indulge their warlike nature… they were dark times,” Nath says. Her voice is level, and cool. These events are distant to her now, a far-gone memory. “Not a lot of books got written in that period. The ones that did probably didn’t survive.”

“They wanted to forget?”

It’s a question, but there is an accusation for it. Of course. The ten thousand years since the war have elapsed in the blink of an eye for Sora. For her, the wound is still fresh, the feelings undiluted by time.

“Not as such, but… All the books will have been written much later, so a lot of the details will be sketchy,” Nath replies, cautiously. “Maybe we should pick a different topic.”

She knows even as she suggests it that Sora will refuse. But she also knows that sometimes being able to retreat is comforting, even if you have no intention of doing so. They’ve earned their right to pick their battles, after all this time.

“I have some money, so we don’t have to get just one. We should get one that I want, one that you want, and an easy one so I can practice.”

It’s a fine suggestion, although easier said than done. It has been a long time since Nath set foot in a real bookshop; it’s far easier to read things digitally, since tablets are so much easier for her to control. It limits what she can read, of course. The older titles, or obscure ones, never get transcribed. They exist, but are just as lost to her as if they had been burned in the final fires of the conflict.

They begin to make their rounds. The bookshelves have been arrayed in four concentric circles, with breaks at each of the cardinal directions; each segment holds a different genre, and each shelf is laden to the brim. The effect is a little like being hemmed into a labyrinth of solid oak and bound paper. Off to one side in its own little alcove, a coffee shop sits raised on a deck of old timber floorboards, quietly alluring. The idea, it seems, is quite simple: get lost in the books, let your feet grow tired, pick one, and retire with a hot drink to read a little before you go home.

It’s slow going. Sora leads, her fingers trailing across the spines of the hardback books, as if she could somehow glean any information from the raised letters of the author’s names. Every so often, seemingly at random, she plucks one from the shelf and examines the cover with a critical eye; if it passes some hidden test, she presents it to Nath for elaboration. Occasionally, Nath sees a volume that might be of interest, and has to shepherd her back to pick it out.

“Do you like the feel of them?” Nath asks, somewhere between looking at the Unabridged History of Trains and the memoirs of a deadbeat politician from three hundred years ago.

“Oh. …I’m sorry,” Sora replies, suddenly becoming aware of herself. She balls up her hands and thrusts them into her pockets, almost petulantly. “I wasn’t thinking.”

Nath is caught halfway between a smile and frown. “It’s fine. You just seem to be a tactile kind of person.”

Sora nods, a little absently. “I’m good with my hands. I can juggle, and fold paper cranes. I’ll show you some time.”

Eventually, they find what they’re looking for, or close enough to it that they’re willing to stop wandering in circles. _The War to End the World: An Illustrated History_ for Sora, a book on the various regional foods of the area for Nath, and a teenager’s book of jokes for reading comprehension. (Nath feels like Suguri and Hime are going to experience some very obnoxious puns in their future, although they’ll probably enjoy them more than anybody their age has a right to).

They’ve paid for their literature and have almost escaped before the inevitable happens, and Nath’s stomach lets forth an audible growl. She frowns, uncomfortable. Their shopping trip has taken longer than she expected; perhaps it was not a wise idea to belay food in favour of books, although the experience has brought her fundamentally closer to being a college student. Sora’s gaze drifts from the exit to the coffee shop, where a shelf has been dedicated to displaying pastries of all types, and in her heart, Nath knows what will happen next.

“Sora, no. I can’t eat here,” she tries, even though she feels it will be in vain. “People will stare if I start using my feet. If we were in one of the little local places where they know me, it would be different, but…”

Sora tilts her head, quizzical. “I’ll help.”

Nath almost sighs, but holds back. How does she explain? Being fed by another person is… not unpleasant, but intimate. More intimate, perhaps, than the bounds of friendship allow. But then, Sora’s model of friendship is probably different, since she’s so close to Suguri and Hime, who seem less like friends and more like lovers who haven’t realised it yet.

“Nath, you’re being a doof,” the girl says, looking at her with those piercing green eyes. It’s as if she’s reading her mind. Nevertheless, Nath feels her eyebrow quirk.

“A doof?”

“Yes. You are doofy, and hungry, and we’re getting food,” Sora replies, and gives her a light push towards the café. If it were anybody else trying to push her, Nath would have laughed, but a light push from Sora is like a light push from a bulldozer. Before she knows it, she’s been marched to a table and Sora is thrusting a menu in front of her nose, demanding that she convert the rounded letters into food names and prices. There is a serious set to the blonde girl’s jaw that will brook no resistance, and, resigned, she concedes that there is a small possibility she would be interested in a danish pastry and some coffee to wash it down with.

Sora scuttles off to take her place in the queue, leaving Nath with a stack of books and a feeling of… anticipation? It’s difficult to tell. Her friend no longer feels alien and unknowable to her, but she’s still a little unpredictable. Volatile, perhaps, is the word: quick to jump into action, always taking the simplest route through social situations. She watches as Sora talks to the cashier, counts out the shiny little coins into her hand one by one, and begins to wonder how much influence Hime and Suguri have over her.

“I got a hot chocolate as well,” the blonde girl says when she returns, depositing the tray onto the table with exaggerated gentleness. There’s barely a ripple in the surface of the coffee; she carried it all with a poise that put the waitress to shame. Nath takes a deep breath, feels the aroma of food and drink hit her nose, and her belly growls in response.

“Coffee is an acquired taste. A little like wine,” Nath explains. “You were right, though. I am hungry. Can I get a bite of that danish?”

She closes her eyes and opens her mouth. Really, she needn’t close her eyes, but there’s something about just holding her mouth open that’s faintly embarrassing. Any second, she expects to feel the flaky pastry brush against her lips, taste almonds and pecans as Sora leans across the table with a fork. Instead, she hears the scraping of the chair.

“Hm?”

“It’s easier this way,” Sora explains. Calling anything Sora says ‘explaining’ is a little bit of a stretch, Nath thinks, but it’s as close as she gets. She parks her chair right next to Nath’s and sits down so they’re shoulder to shoulder, almost cheek to cheek. It feels very different from sitting across the table to each other. Nath resolves not to blush, and almost manages it. Sora, seemingly unaffected, cuts off a chunk of danish with the side of her fork.

“Aaaa,” she says. An impish kind of smile is forming on her face.

“Don’t do tha–” Nath begins, but the fork presses gently, gently to her lips before she can finish. “Mmmfph.”

She chews quickly, but not quickly enough; by the time she’s swallowed, Sora has armed herself with the cup of coffee – flat white, just as Nath requested. She gently holds it to her lips, before tilting it just the tiniest bit. So careful, and with such delicate, deliberate movements.

“Better?” Sora asks, when Nath has taken a long sip.

“Better. But please, don’t say ‘ahhh’ if you’re doing this kind of thing. I am ten thousand years old, and I have a _little_ dignity,” she replies, pouting. Her pouts are a rare and glorious thing, rarely deployed and very effective.

Despite their scarcity, Sora seems unimpressed. “You have foam on your lip.”

She rolls her eyes. “I wonder whose fault that is.”

It was a mistake, of course. She should know better than to waste time chatting when she should have been licking her lips, and by the time she realises it, Sora’s hand has already reached her face. With those same delicate, gentle movements, she wipes away the foam with her finger.

“ _Sora!”_

Her voice is perhaps a little too loud, and betrays a little too much, but Sora takes no notice of her. Instead, she pops her finger in her mouth. Nath begins to feel important parts of her brain shutting down from pure embarrassment.

“It’s bitter and sweet at the same time,” Sora murmurs.

“I-It’s an adult’s sense of taste!” she replies hotly.

“I never said it was bad,” the girl replies, and her grin is now definitively impish. Hime has been a bad influence on her. Briskly, she taps one of the letters in the title of her book of jokes. “Here. Teach me this squiggly one.”

Nath groans. “I’m going to need more coffee for this.”

“You’ll have to earn it,” Sora says, leaning against her.

Nath grumbles; her cheeks are still burning as she begins to explain, first in stumbling half-sentences and then with more fluency, the swooping letters of a modern alphabet. Her tone is not urgent, and her voice is honeyed by the occasional sip of coffee. Before she knows it, the evening sun is glowing amber through the windows of the shop. It is only then that she realises that, in this place filled with the words of the past, her time has begun to move forward.


	15. Snowy Day

Nanako swept along the snowy streets, eyes chattering, teeth chattering, her fists balled deep within the pockets of a coat that came down to her ankles. Winter, she had decided, was absolutely not necessary. What kind of idiot had designed this planet, anyway? There was too much ocean, not enough mountains, and the countries didn’t even look like anything. The least they could do was trim the landmass so it looked like a fluffy sheep from the air or something, but no, all the people on Earth were too lazy and landbound to do even a simple thing like that.

As usual, Kae was late, for reasons Nana couldn’t even imagine. How on earth could Kae consistently arrive late when she refused to move at less than a run and shouted ‘whoosh!’ whenever she was going anywhere? Had nobody educated Kae on the true meaning of whoosh? Was she somehow whoosh deficient?

And, of course, she had picked _today_ of all days to be late – the one time that Nanako could have actually _used_ somebody with the body temperature of a space heater and no sense of personal space. For a moment, she fought the urge to shake her fist and hurl invectives at the clouds. How dare they conspire to blot out the sun and reduce her to a shivering wreck? If that hadn’t been bad enough, it had begun to snow. The sky was actually throwing _tiny pieces of cold_ at her. Who did it think it was? Somebody, she seethed, ought to go up there and show the sky who was boss, and she was exactly the girl to do it.

Sadly, as tempting as it was to fly up into the sky and perforate it with lasers, there were a few problems with the plan. First, the sky was very big. Disgustingly big, in Nanako’s opinion. There was no need for anything to be that large, ever. Which meant it was more than big enough to shrug off anything Nanako could do.

Second, the sky had friends. Scary friends. Suguri’s opinion on wilful destruction of the ozone layer was very dim indeed, and getting on the wrong side of Suguri was a recipe for some lumps and/or bumps. There was also rumours that she’d adopted a blonde weirdo (not Hime, _another_ blonde weirdo) who was very into the sky, and very homicidal when she thought it was being mistreated.

Thirdly, the sky was not actually an animate object, and could not feel pain or regret. Nanako had known bigger obstacles in the path to revenge, but that one still ranked pretty highly on the list.

Bereft of any way to meaningfully rebuke what had (over the course of perhaps thirty or forty seconds) become her arch-nemesis, she settled for shouting insults at the clouds for a minute or two instead. She learned two things in combat training: the first was how to command a small armada of dangerous robotic weaponry, and the second was how to swear fluently and creatively in a number of languages. Sadly, as a result of her dedication, proper use of either of these skills took up her entire brain power.

As a result, she didn’t notice the sound of heavy bootsteps in the snow. She didn’t notice the ragged breathing. She didn’t even notice the ‘whoosh’. She was still telling the sky _exactly_ what she thought of its mother when Kae crashed into her at full speed. The proper reaction, of course, was to continue swearing furiously as she toppled into the snow, which she did dutifully.

“I made it, Nana! I was gonna be late but then I didn’t!” Kae bellowed into her ear. Kae was good at bellowing, and like any enthusiastic craftsman she put her skills into practice at every opportunity. She wasn’t wearing a coat, Nanako noticed, but then, it was Kae. Freedom of movement was more fun than not freezing to death, and if she got cold it gave her an excuse to work up a sweat.

“You’re _still_ late, because we agreed to meet up a quarter of an hour ago!” Nana hissed.

Kae tilted her head. “But you always say, ‘oh, give it an extra fifteen minutes as a Kae allowance.’ It’s fifteen minutes, so I’m still on time!”

“I do not _always_ say that! I’ve said it exactly _once_ in the entire history of the universe!”

The argument was lost on Kae, who was very much a present tense kind of person, and who was presently completely ignoring the tension that Nanako was feeling so keenly. It always went like this. Kae was broad strokes, and she was fine detail. She could argue against Kae, but she’d always lose, because seriously arguing against somebody who isn’t at all serious is a loss in and of itself. Kae always swept her up in that endless fountain of enthusiasm, and all she could do was try to nudge them so they didn’t crash into the banks.

“Ahahaha. This is why I like you, Nana. You’re always so passionate about weird stuff,” Kae giggled, climbing to her feet. “Alright, alright, alright! Let’s go on a date!”

“This is _not_ a date,” Nanako snarled, rising and beating the snow off her new coat. “Friends don’t date friends.”

“Suguri and Hime go on dates all the time, and they’re really good friends!”

“Yeah, well. That silverhair wouldn’t know subtext if it hit her in the face.” Especially considering that Hime wielded it with all the subtlety of a battering ram.

For some reason, Kae found the verdict on Suguri’s love life to be a source of profound amusement, and devoted the next minute of her life to giggling like a loon. Kae’s giggle was a special thing all by itself; it started as a hiccup of laughter, and moved through the stages of belly laughing, snorting and hands-over-the-mouth snorts through to a full-fledged giggle fit. It was less correct to say that she laughed than to say that laughter consumed her.

“Ahahahaa… That’s so like you, Nana. You’re always worrying about everybody else.”

“If you knew what everybody else was like, they’d worry you too,” Nanako grumbled, mollified. “What do you wanna do, then?”

“Oh, oh! Let’s do food!”

Without further discussion, Kae began her charge to nowhere in particular, and Nanako was forced to scuttle breathlessly after her. As she ran along in the wake of her friend, a fire of envy was lit in Nana’s heart. How was she supposed to keep up with Kae, who had been blessed with such long, muscular legs? The answer, of course, was unforthcoming, and she found herself falling further and further behind as a result, helplessly chasing her friend through a world of whirling snow. Shuttered windows flashed by in her peripheral vision as she ran, with hand-painted signs hung above them, and every so often they would pass a faux wrought iron lamppost that hid efficient, modern electrics under the veneer of a simpler time.

“Wait up, you dope! I can’t run that fast!” she called, although she was sure the words would be spirited away by the rushing air around her face. She could have shouted anything, and Kae would never have heard it. A barked order, a torrent of invectives. Even a confession of love.

It seemed like some small fragment of her voice had carried, though, since Kae slowed her stride… just enough to snake her hand back and lock her fingers around Nana’s wrist. The purple-haired girl had the foresight to gulp before Kae sped up again, quickly enough that the ground fled from her feet. With Nanako dangling behind her like a kite, Kae charged ahead, fist raised, to meet the world.

* * *

 “I can’t believe we got lost.”

“Ahahaha. It was an adventure, Nana!”

“Argh! Quit sounding so happy about it already!”

They must, Nanako thought, have looked a sight when they walked into the pub: one of them under-dressed and over-endowed in every area except sense, and the other one built like a fire hydrant and cussing at a rate of knots. She shivered quietly, and wondered if they’d sell her some warm mulled wine. Probably not. Being short was as much of a curse as being beautiful, sometimes.

“Hey, hey, where should we go after this?” Kae asked.

“We only just got here!”

“Yeah, but this isn’t where I wanted to go.”

She had begun to relax, slouching exuberantly on the padded chair. Nanako did a quick inventory of everything around them, and how dangerous it was to have them within arm’s reach of a bored Kae. Salt, pepper, various metal cutlery. Danger rating: incomprehensible. Suggested course of action: distract with small talk until food came. It was just disaster prevention tactics. It wasn’t as if she was enjoying the frenetic pace of the day, and it wasn’t as though she was going to be flirting or anything like that. Of course not.

“Where did you want to go?” she asked, hiding her face behind a concertina of cardboard full of dishes and drinks she probably didn’t have the money for.

“I dunno! I’ll know when I see it. Did you wanna go anywhere, Nana?”

A pause, as if to take a breath before doing something stupid. “Nowhere in particular.”

“You’re so aimless, Nana!”

“You’re one to talk,” Nanako replied. It was true, though. They had this wide world in front of them, and she didn’t really know what she wanted from it. She couldn’t exactly return to space, either. In space at least there had been orders. Things to seek. She had always been taught that orders were absolute, and so they were; but they had also ended, absolutely, and left her without a real purpose. Beyond shepherding Kae, of course.

“Just pick a direction,” she said eventually. “Pick a direction, and I’ll follow.”

Kae smiled, a kid who had gotten her way. “Alright, alright! We’ll find something cool. But keep up this time, Nana. I don’t wanna have to drag you along!”

“How about you slow down instead? Quit trying to run away from me.”

By the time the waiter had deposited their food, they had settled into a pattern of amicable bickering, a pattern they kept up between spoonfuls of warming soup and bites of soft, crusty bread. It was something nostalgic, and comforting, in a new world with no place set out for them. Perhaps one day, Nana thought, they would build that place, brick by brick, piece by piece, and invite everybody to share it with them. But before that, they had to find the foundations.

This world had too much ocean, not enough mountains, and the landmasses were sadly untrimmed. But Kae would explore it, with her long legs and her boundless energy, and Nanako would be right behind her.


	16. Orbs and Baubles

Part of the human condition, in Suguri’s experience, was that you occasionally found yourself in a strange situation with very little idea of how you came to be there. Usually, though, there was a convenient catch-all excuse that might explain how things had got that far, like alcohol or energy drinks or a posse of clowns. Her personal catch-all excuse was quickly becoming ‘Hime’.

It wasn’t that Hime was a smooth talker, although with Sora and Suguri for competition, you could be forgiven for thinking so. It was just her enthusiastic, straightforward way of doing things that made it easy to get carried along for the ride. How long ago was it that she said to just cleave off the civilian block of her ship, just like that?

Sometimes, however, it was her own fault. She just asked the wrong questions and got the wrong answers, and doomed herself to a cascade of increasingly unlikely events. Curiosity was a killer of men, and could strike at any time.

“Hime,” she said one morning (‘morning’, of course, being sometime in the late afternoon). “What does your orb do?”

Hime blinked. Hime blinked several thousand times a day at regular intervals, and in fact never really seemed to stop blinking unless her eyes were closed altogether. But sometimes, just sometimes, Hime’s blinks had weight behind them. A hidden message, if you would. If Suguri had had to send a hidden message with blinks she would have been forced to use some kind of rudimentary morse code system, but Hime could do it with a single flicker of an eyelid. It was magic. Scary, dark magic.

“What does your zipper do?” the blonde asked, in lieu of giving an actual answer. Almost as if she had yet to decide what the answer was.

“It’s a zipper. It zips,” Suguri replied. She was a talented student of tautologies, and deployed them much as other people might deploy a battleship – often to an effect just as destructive.

“But why is it so large?”

“Why wouldn’t it be? It’s easier to use.”

Hime’s immediate reaction was to grab the oversized zipper and pull, demonstrating that, yes, a zipper half as long as the average human arm was indeed pretty easy to operate. She was dismayed when, instead of pale, supple skin, she was greeted by a fuzzy expanse of green wool speckled with red knitted reindeer.

“You wear a  _sweater_  under your jacket?” she asked, aghast. It would have taken a high-school acting class, with a teacher of considerable talent, half a semester to learn to compress such a high amount of offended-ness into one expression.

“I get cold when I’m flying around. Wind chill is a thing.”

This was so annoyingly reasonable that Hime almost, but didn’t  _quite_ , forget that Suguri flew around in what basically amounted to a mini skirt and knee socks, and should by all rights have frostbite on her thighs.

“Oh, boo. You know, I was honestly expecting you to just have a sports bra under there. I was looking forward to a rare view of your belly button,” she replied airily. “Besides, we’re indoors.”

“I get it, but I’d rather you didn’t take my clothes off without permission,” Suguri deadpanned.

“I simply don’t understand what the big deal is,” Hime sniffed. “We sleep in our underwear anyway.”

“That’s different. There’s a pillow wall, so it’s still a respectable sleeping arrangement,” she replied stiffly. She was not entirely sure  _why_  a respectable sleeping arrangement was so important, since it wasn’t like they had all that much regular contact with society at large. But what she was sure of was that, once Pandora’s Box had been opened, it could never be closed again.

“Yes, which I meant to talk to you about. Why do we have the pillow wall, anyway? You just roll over it in the night, and I wake up with your leg in my mouth.”

Suguri cocked her head to the side. “Is that why I keep waking up with drool on my ankles?”

“Yes, my dear. So it really doesn’t serve any purpose. Besides, wouldn’t you sleep so much better if you could enjoy midnight hugs? We could  _have_ midnight hugs, Suguri. All it would take is the abolition of one little wall, and the freedom of the pillows forced to maintain it. It’s within our power.”

Suguri’s face flickered through three different strengths of unimpressed before returning to something approximating diplomatic neutrality. “The pillow wall is an important part of my cultural heritage. I can’t let it go that easily.”

They were at an impasse, and it was into this very dangerous social territory that Sora blithely wandered. She had apparently been attempting to tame her hair and forgotten about it, because her brush was stuck about halfway down her shaggy curls and showed no signs of going anywhere fast. Her new destination was the fridge, but she felt the conflict in the air and stopped dead in her tracks.

“Are you two fighting?” she asked. Her face, as always, was just a touch difficult to read; was she anxious, or excited?

“No, no. Mommy and daddy aren’t  _fighting._  We’re just having a passionate debate,” Hime said, her voice soothing and honey-sweet.

“That’s good,” Sora nodded, sagely. “If you were fighting, I’d have to beat you both up. I’ve done it before.”

Hime’s eyes narrowed a touch. “Yes, well. If you beat me up, then I won’t write your name in ketchup when I make omurice any more.”

Suguri put her hands on Hime’s shoulders. “Don’t you think that’s a little extreme?” she whispered, urgently. “The ketchup name is the best part of omurice.”

The goddess turned up her nose and sniffed. “The punishment fits the crime, then.”

Sora’s gaze grew flinty and dangerous. “I can make my own omurice. I’ll put all our names on it, then eat it all by myself. Plus, I’ll tell Suguri about the time you came downstairs in the night and ate a whole jar of jam.”

“…A whole jar?” Suguri asked, her ahoge twitching.

“A whole jar. By itself. No bread. Just with a spoon.”

“That’s quite enough, Sora! It was a moment of weakness. I just needed something a little sweet, is all. I wouldn’t have needed to eat so much jam if I had access to something  _else_  that was sweet. Such as, perhaps, a midnight hug.”

Suguri frowned. Eating a whole jar of jam was not, in her opinion, a midnight snack  _or_  a moment of weakness. It was a cry for help. She felt her resolve wavering. Would it really be so bad to lose the pillow wall? It  _would_  be nice to not start every morning by painstakingly rebuilding it. Perhaps she could get Hime to make some concessions for it, too. It bore greater consideration at a later date.

“What were you...debating?” Sora asked, when she thought that Hime’s remark had stayed in the air long enough.

“Suguri was asking me what my orb did.”

Sora tilted her head. “What  _does_  it do?”

“What does  _your_ orb do?” Hime asked, a little defensively.

“It’s a shield modulator. I can mess around with it to alter my shield’s size and strength.”

Hime clapped her hands, intrigued. “Ooh. That seems quite practical. May we have a demonstration?”

“No.”

“No?”

“No,” Sora replied, and set about the task of making a sandwich, apparently quite content to leave the matter there. Explaining herself was not really her forte. Her forte was shooting things, fashioning sandwiches out of whatever leftovers were in the fridge, and making Nath blush. As she didn’t have Nath or her gun in her pockets, she applied herself to the one remaining possibility.

“Wait, wait, wait. Why can’t you demonstrate your shield modulator?”

Sora put a soft, pillowy loaf of bread on the table, and glared at it intently, as if testing it for some unseen quality. “It has a pre-set. The pre-set makes the shield expand. When the shield expands, it pushes things outwards really hard. I’d break the kitchen.”

“You… you mean the furniture?” Suguri asked.

“The kitchen.”

Hime let that sink in for a moment, and considered the possibilities. On one hand, now that she knew Sora’s neck ornament was highly dangerous, it was incredibly tempting to just give it a tiny boop and see what happened. On the other hand, she would almost certainly lose brownie points with Suguri for destroying select bits of her house. On the whole, she thought it better to abstain from boopage and the consequences thereof, although it was a very close thing.

“So. Your orb?” Sora asked, taking a seat.

“It’s… for hypnosis! I can use it to hypnotise people,” Hime declared, after only a second of frantic invention. “Oh, yes. I’ve always been able to do it. I just don’t use it, ever. For any reason.”

Suguri smiled to herself. Hypnosis. Really? She knew that she was often a little generous with the benefit of the doubt when Hime was concerned, but even she couldn’t take the claim seriously. It had to be a joke.

“That’s amazing,” Sora said, and there was genuine admiration in her green eyes. “Show me.”

“I just don’t use it.  _Ever._   _For any reason_ ,” Hime repeated.

“I’ll give you my bread.”

“That’s my bread, actually,” Suguri reminded her. Sora hugged the bread closer to her chest; if she had been a cat, she would no doubt have hissed.

“I don’t care how many loaves of delicious Suguri bread you offer me, my answer remains the same. Hypnosis is too great a power to be unleashed willy-nilly, you know.”

“Three scoops of ice cream,” Suguri offered.

“Make it seven, and perhaps we shall talk,” Hime replied, and the bidding war began in earnest.

“Three scoops and two handfuls of sprinkles.”

“Six scoops and strawberry syrup.”

“Four scoops, no bonus.”

“Six, and I refuse to go lower than that.”

“Five scoops but only one of them can be strawberry.”

“Oh, mean! Strawberry is the best!”

“Rocky road is better,” Sora chimed in.

“Oh, Sora, dear, come over here so I can give you this medal for being the most wrong out of all the people on the planet,” Hime replied sweetly.

“Sure. I’ll present it to you properly.”

“Honestly, I prefer mint chocolate chip,” Suguri said.

Hime clapped her hand over her mouth. “Such heresy!”

“She’s a heretic,” Sora nodded.

“Five scoops and only one strawberry, but you have to spoon-feed me the entire first scoop.”

“Five scoops of any flavour and a warning not to push your luck,” Suguri said, dryly.

“Oh, very well then. Five scoops with sprinkles it is,” Hime said, tutting. “Now, prepare yourselves to be hypnotised.”

Preparing to be hypnotised was a difficult task, because nobody quite knew what it involved. Suguri contended that they had to enter a deep, meditative state, so that their minds could fall slack and open themselves to Hime’s power’s of suggestion. In Sora’s opinion, it was probably something to do with star charts and the healing qualities of crystals, because those always seemed to pop up sooner or later. Hime herself decided to shed as little light as possible on the whole process. In the end, the sum total of their hypnosis preparation was to make sure everybody was sitting down.

“Ahem! Now, listen to the sound of my voice,” Hime began.

“Well, we can’t listen to the taste of your voice,” Suguri said wryly.

“Don’t backchat me when I’m hynotising you, please. Now then, turn your attention to my crystal. Do you see how shiny its lustre is? The light refracting in its depths? How very pink it is?”

Hime was warming to her performance now. She had lowered her voice to something mysterious and butter-smooth, and was making vague, flowing gestures with her hands. It seemed like an important thing to do. Half of hypnotising people was convincing them that they were being hypnotised, probably.

“Your minds are receding… your  _selves_  are receding. You are becoming receptive, able to do things you would never have thought yourself capable of. Count your breaths… you are falling, descending. When I click my fingers, you will be asleep. One… two… three!”

Hime clicked her fingers sharply, and Suguri, very awake and very amused, allowed herself a low chuckle. For something that had never been more than a half-baked joke, Hime had taken it so seriously. It was – and Suguri did not use the term lightly – adorable.

“I don’t know what  _you’re_ laughing at, Suguri. For one, you owe me five scoops of ice cream. And for two, I got Sora.”

Sure enough, Sora was snoring soundly, slumped over the table and using her loaf of bread as a pillow. Suguri reached over and ruffled her hair. She dropped her voice to a low whisper. “I don’t think that’s hypnosis. I think it’s just… her being herself.”

“You’re just trying to deny my powers. Besides, you sleep like a log too,” Hime whispered back.

“We can’t leave her like this. She’ll get crumbs in her hair, and she’ll squash the bread. Could you go upstairs and get her a pillow?”

Hime gave her a lingering gaze, that was a question and a thank you all rolled into one. “You  _do_  know where I’m going to take the pillow from, correct?”

“From the pillow wall. It’s for a good cause. We can discuss the rest of them later.”

That, when all was said and done, was how Suguri found herself trying to pull a loaf of bread out from underneath her friend’s face and replace it with a pillow before her cheek hit the table. And, to her great credit, she very nearly managed it.


	17. Thunderstorm

She didn’t say she was coming, but there’s a cup of tea waiting for her on the table, to her mild surprise. Perhaps Hime is psychic, or perhaps it’s simply an article of faith; Nath doesn’t know the answer, but she’s glad to have it. The rain outside is falling in thick, heavy waves, crashing against the windows and battering against the roof; her clothes are sodden, and water is trickling from her hair down to her chin. But the curtain of thick, dark cloud hides more than a coating of rain, and water is not all that’s falling. Even now, jagged strikes of lightning are reaching down to touch the face of the land, to scorch and to singe, and they bring peals of rolling thunder for a companion. It’s as fair a storm as Nath has seen in a few years, and she’s pleased to be out of it.

“Sorry I didn’t answer the phone. I can work buttons, but it takes a little while,” she says, polite but toneless. Although she’s a firm believer in good manners, sometimes she can’t help but want to be more direct about things. If she was in her own home right now, she would have kicked off her soaked books and shook her head like a dog to get the water out of her hair. Alas, no such luck.

“Oh, my apologies. I just didn’t think! I’ll text or leave a voice message next time. Here, have a seat and I’ll get you a towel,” Hime says, but the pace of her voice is… off. She seems nervous, a little highly strung. Skittish, maybe.

“I’ll stand. If I sit down, the chair will get wet,” Nath says. She tries to soften her voice a little, slow her words. She’s always found that the best way to deal with nervous people is to calm down herself. “Do you mind if I use bits indoors?”

Hime is almost out of the room already, but she jumps to a dancer’s halt. No extra momentum, a perfect stop. “Oh! Oh, yes, Sora said something about that. By all means, go ahead! And don’t worry about the chairs. I’m sure they don’t mind.”

Nath sighs as her host departs. She had considered staying home when the phone rang, but Hime had never called her out of the blue. Nobody really calls her out of the blue. Nowadays, her phone is more of a clock. Not even a watch, since she can’t really handle it easily – although to be fair, it wasn’t as though she wears a lot of watches. So, on the basis of a hunch, she forged out into the wind and the rain. Sure enough, it feels like something is wrong. The only question is what.

She takes a delicate sip of her tea as she makes herself comfortable. It has to be delicate. Her tractor bits are useful but fine control is a chore, and she’s dumped enough hot beverages in her lap over the course of her life to know not to rush the balancing act. She tastes an undertone of sweet vanilla, no doubt one of Hime’s fabled kitchen experiments. Not a bad one, though. If nothing else it is warm and soothing, and chases off the shivers from the rain.

Her attention turns to the living room, which is… less chaotic than she remembers it. The furniture, usually more or less strewn about wherever it seemed to fit, has taken on a more orderly formation. It gives the room a different kind of personality, but it hardly seems like cause for panic. Not the reason Hime called her, then, but perhaps a clue? Maybe not. She has the odd sensation that there is something missing, subtracted from the scene. Of course, she rebukes herself, all baseless speculation does is pass the time until Hime comes back with the actual answer.

As it turns out, she doesn’t have long to wait. Her host arrives with a long bathtowel folded over her arms, black and white like a chequered flag. “Here, let’s get your hair dried at least. I expect you’ll need a hand?” she says with a wink.

Nath smiles. Hime is still the only one bold, or cheeky, enough to make that kind of joke with her. Although at first she found it quite disarming (so to speak), it’s one of the things she respects about the blonde girl. It puts her in mind of the first time they met, and had a strange discussion on the doorstep that neither one of them fully understood. As her mind follows the trail of the memory, she realises what seems off.

“It’s evening now. Is that other girl, Suguri, not awake?” she asks as Hime dries her hair. The blonde girl’s hands slow, and she senses that she’s hit the mark. It’s a long few seconds before the answer comes.

“...No. She’s away right now. Investigating some organisation she thinks is shady. I’m not worried, since it’s Suguri, but her being away is half of the problem.”

“And Sora?”

Hime exhales, long and low. “The other half.”

“I thought as much,” Nath murmurs. “You think I can help?”

“Mm. It’s just that…” Hime begins, and thinks carefully about what she’ll say. “Both of those girls are… quiet, you could say. With Suguri, it isn’t a problem, because she’s usually straightforward about things. But with Sora… I suppose I just feel like Sora has gone through things, and is going through things, that I can’t quite understand, so it’s harder for me to get close.”

She’s careful to keep her tone neutral. “You mean the war.”

“Yes.”

“Where is she now?”

“Huddled up in the bedroom… ah, wait!”

Nath has already gotten to her feet, wet hair be damned. She straightens her back and pushes back her shoulders, a deliberate gesture to hide the irritation building in the pit of her stomach. Ten thousand years, she thinks. Ten thousand years, and the war is still following her. The war, the war, the war. It is an old wound to her now, and it has no right to reach into her life after so long.

“Nath, be careful, will you?” Hime asks, quiet and serious. “I feel like she might lash out… Did I ever tell you how we met? Suguri and I were passing by when she first awoke, and the first thing she did was fight us. It was like she’d gone berserk. It was fine that time… but without Suguri here, I don’t know if I could contain her if she becomes becomes aggressive again. The town is so close...”

When Nath speaks, it is in the businesslike tone of somebody who accounts for all eventualities, and knows when to value clarity over kindness. “I understand. I fought her during the war. Lost pretty badly. But unless she has her rifle in her back pocket, it shouldn’t be a problem. I’m bigger, heavier, and built tougher, so I should win in close quarters. For now, I’d like to assume it won’t come to that. I’m going to go up, so in the meantime, I’d like you to make enough tea for the three of us.”

Hime smiles, and breathes what might be a pre-emptive sigh of relief. “Thank you, Nath. I knew that calling you was the right decision. It’s frustrating since I can’t do anything to help by myself, but I’m sure you can manage.”

Nath finds a lot to think about as she climbs the stairs. The most important thing is to plan her approach. She takes care to tread loudly, walk with a steady pace. Not sudden, not quiet. Predictable. Surprising Sora is the thing she most wants to avoid, because it’ll be the easiest way to find herself in a fight that she’s not quite as confident of winning as she led Hime to believe. The rain is still battering against the roof, and a heavy roll of thunder calls as she approaches the door of the master bedroom, left just ajar. There’s an urge to peek, but it’s not the right call.

“Sora,” she calls, and her voice is clear and calm. “It’s Nath. I’m about to come in.”

There’s no reply. She waits for a good five seconds, then nudges the door open with her shoulder and appraises the bedroom with a sweeping glances. It’s a bedroom too big for one person, more orderly than the rest of the house, conservatively decorated. A standing closet with a selection of dresses, a floor length mirror, and a set of dressing tables seem to be the newest additions. Everything else is almost antique, including the bed, which is wide with an oddly ornate carved footboard, and a wall of pillows (with a few missing) forming a dividing line down the middle.

Balled up in one corner is Sora, her knees pressed to her chest, her knuckles white and the tendons of her hands arched up as she clutches the fabric of her shirt. Her eyes are hard and glinting in the near-gloom, and her face seems pale and somehow more angular. If she had been rocking back and forth, Nath would perhaps have been a little relieved, but she is perfectly and utterly still. The very picture of a cornered animal.

“I’m going to sit down.”

It isn’t a request. It is a simple statement of fact. She reprises her steady, predictable stride and charts her way to the side of the bed opposite to Sora’s. The mattress groans and creaks under her weight, but holds.

“You okay? You didn’t reply when I called to you.”

A moment of tense silence. “I… I thought I imagined it.”

Her voice is rasping, a croak. A dry throat. Definitely fear, Nath thinks, although it’s obvious. Fear is a dangerous thing. The more afraid you become, the more afraid everybody else becomes. The more afraid everybody else is, the more justified your own fear, and the larger it grows. It was probably a good thing Hime didn’t come up, Nath decides. She seemed nervous, and that might have been the spark to start the fire.

She lets the sound of rain fill the air between them. There no need to speak just yet. She’s not in a hurry, and the longer she stays as she is, the more time Sora will have to get comfortable with her being there. The blonde girl still hasn’t moved. She seems so different from the girl Nath has become used to – the quiet girl who always seemed to be doing something with her hands, who reached out to her with such easy affection. She’d gotten more hugs from Sora in the brief time since they met again than she’d had for years. But now the girl kept her hands to herself.

“Let me tell you a story,” Nath began, when she felt the weight of the silence beginning to be a burden rather than a help. “It was a couple years after they patched me up. The world was still a chaotic place, back then. People were rebuilding, reconnecting. Getting back to life after devoting themselves to death. But there are always some folks who take advantage of times like that.”

Sora says nothing, but her interest is piqued. She doesn’t turn her head, but she still looks at Nath from the corner of her eye, watching her face, her mouth.

“Well, I ran into one of the unscrupulous types. He had a gun, one of those old-time, pre-war things. Kinetic, six round clip, single fire, snub nose, badly made. He wanted me to give him my money and get on the ground, and, well, I didn’t feel like it. Why would I? With a weapon like that, he could have emptied it against my forehead and been lucky to leave a bruise. But he decided to escalate things and show off that he was serious, so he fired a shot into the air.”

“...What happened?”

Nath pauses, arranges her words in her mind. “I’m not a hundred percent sure. Everything after that is just a big, blank space. Lost time. I know that they nearly had to put the guy back together with a needle and thread, and I just kept shouting when they were trying to calm me down. The last thing I really remember is the sound of the gun, and the smell of gunpowder. It… took me back to places that I really didn’t want to go again, and I just lost it. Went on autopilot.”

Sora says nothing, but lowers her head to meet her knees. The patter of raindrops on the roof fills the empty space. Nath takes a moment to collect herself again. The story was a little more taxing on her than she thought.

“So, that’s my story,” she says, doggedly. “Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, why don’t you tell me how you feel about the thunder?”

Sora turns her head sharply, eyes wide, and she knows she’s hit her mark. The girl inhales shakily. “It’s… it sounds too much like the artillery. Against a black sky… It reminds me of the first time I ever went out to fight. I can’t get it out of my head. I… hate this.”

“It gets better in time. Having friends who understand helps. If you can get some earmuffs, that’s good too. Otherwise, you had the right idea – find somewhere dark, be still for a while,” Nath says. “And don’t beat yourself up about it. You’re not at fault for feeling this way.”

A second ticks by. Two. Slowly, slowly, Sora rebuilds her composure. When she looks at Nath again, her eyes are no longer wild and hard, but the soft, calm eyes that she’s come to know. “Thank you, Nath.”

Nath smiles, somewhere in the gloom, and leans over the wall of pillows to nudge her shoulder against Sora’s. “I’d give you a hug, but… well, obvious problem. I was a soldier, but I can’t really say I was in the ‘army’.”

“Are you crying?” Sora asks. The question is so sudden that it takes her aback, and the confusion shows in her expression. “There’s water on your face.”

“It’s rain. I came over in a hurry when Hime called me. She was very worried about you,” Nath says. “I told her to make us some tea, if you’re feeling up to it.”

“Nnn. Maybe in a little while. Can… Can I call you if it happens again?”

“If you call me, I’ll come. Pinky promise,” Nath says, and chuckles at her own joke. Sora looks at her, her head tilted in thought.

“You don’t have a pinky finger, but you have a pinky toe. Take off your boots.”

“…Are you kidding?” she asks, flatly.

“No. You owe me a pinky promise. If you won’t take your boots off, I’ll take them off for you,” Sora replies, her eyes glinting.

“You’ll have to wrestled them off me,” Nath says, before realising she should really have held her tongue. In a blink of an eye and a whirl of blonde hair, Sora has her in the beginnings of a fearsome headlock. Luckily, she has a simple response: she stands up, lifting the weigh easily. Suddenly the situation is no longer Nath in a headlock, but Nath with Sora draped over her shoulders like a coat.

“You seem to have livened up. _I_ am going to get some tea, and maybe use your shower because my clothes are drenched. We can talk about pinky promises after that. If you’re coming with me, hold tight.”

“Auuu. Stingy,” Sora murmurs, but keeps her grip. Slowly, with gentle, steady footsteps, Nath carries her friend from the darkened room and down the stairs, where a warm smile is waiting for them.


	18. Cat Smile

“You know, I’m not sure this is a good idea,” Hime says cheerfully, clutching a cup of vibrant blue slushie in her hand. The day is unseasonably warm, and she can imagine no better time to open her heart to the majesty of the slushie than now. The fact that it has dyed her mouth an unnatural shade of cyan is a small concern, but then, she _is_ technically a space alien, and it is the rare privilege of space aliens to have whatever colour tongue they wish. She sticks hers out at Nath, whose hair matches it almost exactly in colour.

For the unenlightened souls who have decided not to pay an exorbitant amount for a cup of luminescent ice, Frankford’s Leisure Centre is not an especially pleasant place to be. Tall ceilings, square rooms and windows placed too high up to funnel a cooling breeze to the people below are a recipe for sweaty disaster. It means a steady stream of coins for the vending machines that serve cold canned drinks and stale junk foods, and a rather more impressive stream of money for the slushie seller stationed cannily at the entrance; the only respite is in the swimming hall, where the smell of chlorine and the wavy reflections of light on the water’s surface have as much pull as a siren does to a ship of Greek heroes.

For Nath, the swimming pool is not an option, and not just because she forgot to bring a bathing suit. Her back is straight but her shoulders are heavy, and weighing them down are a pair of sleek prosthetic arms that seem much too small for her frame. Under the layer of faux-skin (that doesn’t quite match her tanned complexion) lies decades of research and innovation. _And yet_ , she thinks wistfully _, it’s still not as good as the ones I had during the war._

The problem, as she had quickly learned when her original arms began to break down, was not making a good prosthetic arm. That could come in time, and she had time aplenty. The problem was getting a good quality arm that could be retrofitted into the connectors installed in her shoulders. They – she – were war-era technology, a taboo that human society rejected with all its being until the knowledge of it was lost entirely. She knew no more about the minutiae of her construction than anybody else, and the blueprints were lost to time, and fire.

What she had now were prototypes, custom built for her by a technology company she had nurtured with quiet investments over the years. She had lived so long that it was difficult not to become rich, especially given that she had combed over so many burnt-out military bases in search of replacement parts for the various ailing parts of her arsenal. One day, the Tractor Bits she used for tasks she couldn’t quite wrap her feet around would burn out, a grim inevitability that always made her clench her jaw when she thought of it.

“You’re probably right,” she calls to Hime, back in the present. “But I need to stress test them, and the data is more important than the parts.”

“And the way to stress test them is boxing?” Hime asks, a wry smile curling its way around her discoloured lips. “Although, to be perfectly honest, I’m rather more worried about your chin than the arms.”

As much as she hates to admit it, Nath can see her point. Standing in the opposite corner of the great boxing ring is Sora, occupying herself by taking experimental swings with her boxing gloves. Stripped down to a pair of bike shorts and a white tank top, she looks far too lean and short to be allowed anywhere near Nath in a boxing match. But there is a strange, puzzled kind of delight in her eyes when she swings her fists, a bubbling energy as she carefully adjusts her footwork. Under her smooth skin, Nath can pick of the swells of tough, sinewy muscles, long neglected but far from gone.

“You could always be my opponent instead,” Nath calls. “It’d be good exercise. Stop you from getting pudgy while Suguri’s away.”

Hime almost snorts into her slushie in her amusement, but manages to convert it into a ladylike giggle. “My pudge levels are quite within acceptable limits, thank you. Speaking of, don’t you have somewhat of a weight advantage on me?”

“I have a weight advantage on some horses,” she replies, clenching her prosthetic right hand experimentally. She bends the fingers one by one, rotates the wrist experimentally. The movement flow is good, albeit a little slow. Probably some lingering issues with the connectors, since the actual machinery underneath is more than capable of replicating human dexterity. “Sora, what do you think?”

The blonde girl blinks, tilts her head. It takes a second before Nath realises that she’s taking the question literally, and when her mouth opens it’s a stream of conciousness. “It’s really warm. I don’t like these gloves. They make my hands sweat. Can’t we do CQC instead? You look good in a tank top. Hime wouldn’t be pudgy if she didn’t eat so much jam. You should use your new arms to hug people. Boxing is weird because I don’t know where to put my feet.”

“I’ll deal with that in order, shall I?” Nath replies, and makes a show of ticking them off on her fingers as she goes down the list. “You’re right, it’s boiling. The gloves are necessary. I don’t remember what it’s like to have sweaty hands. We’re not doing CQC because I know how it’ll go and I don’t have a death wish. Thanks, you too. Hime’s jam obsession is frankly disturbing. I’ll hug you if you win. That’s what I’m counting on.”

“You know, if I didn’t have a delicious cup of sugary ice-water, I’d have half a mind to come up there and give both of you a quick boxing,” Hime says, far too pleasantly. Even in the blistering warmth, her smile is wintery.

Nath shrugs, rolls her shoulders a little before struggling to don her gloves. She knows that there’s a part of her brain that just intrinsically knows how fingers work, but it’s long out of practice. After a little fiddling, she gets one glove on, and then the other. Luckily, she thinks, the kind of punches she’s going to be throwing aren’t the ones that need fine dexterity.

“You ready?” she asks, throwing a glance over at Sora. The girl is bouncing on the tips of her toes, a ball of energy wrapped in a mane of shaggy blonde hair.

“If I win, you gotta do what I say for a day,” she says, with a stubborn set to her chin that Nath recognises. It’s a non-negotiable kind of chin. An ‘I don’t particularly care what you think, I’m sick of this war and I’m ending it’ kind of chin. A chin not to be messed with.

“A hug isn’t enough?” she asks.

“The hug is the price of admission. One fight, one hug.”

“Greedy.”

“Stingy.”

“Fine. But if _I_ win, you have to do what _I_ say for a day,” Nath says, although she isn’t quite sure what she would use that for. It’s in the spirit of competition, though, and she isn’t enough of a spoilsport to say no to some pre-fight banter. “Hime, please count us in.”

“Very well. Go to your corners, ladies, and remember that there are to be no headbutts, no biting, and no kissing. If I see any, I am withdrawing your ice-cream privileges not just for today, but for the rest of the week.”

Sora blinks slowly. “Why did you say no kissing? Hime, you’re weird.” She turns her gaze to Nath. “It’s cheating if you fire your arms at me like rockets.”

“I’m not a giant robot, you know. I’d also like to point out that I’m a grown woman who doesn’t live with you. My ice-cream privileges are none of anybody’s concern,” Nath grumbles.

“Yes, but you shall be disqualified, which means you’ll lose and be in Sora’s power for a week, and then I shall just ask her to forbid ice cream,” Hime sniffs.

“Don’t worry, Nath. I would never do it.”

“I know _you_ wouldn’t. _You’re_ not evil,” Nath replies, frowning. It hasn’t escaped her notice that the terms of the bet have been quietly multiplied sevenfold.

“Just because I believe in firm discipline doesn’t make me evil. Now! Are you ready? The fight will begin on the count of three. One!”

Nath raises her gloves level to her chin, and is gratified when the prosthetics respond. Quietly, she wonders what it’s like for Sora and Hime, who have to deal with having arms all the time. Sure, it’s convenient, but doesn’t it get in the way? She shakes her head, puts the thought to the back of her mind. No time for that now. She squares her shoulders, grits her teeth. Braces for impact.

“Two!”

In the opposite corner, Sora holds her gloves low, and takes an awkward step to correct her footwork. Combat training was a long time ago, and even that never quite dealt with the restrictions of boxing. But there’s still a bubble of excitement rising in her chest that she can’t quite suppress. In a few, short moments, her world will burst into furious motion. Her time with Suguri and Hime has been quiet and restful and still, a beautiful repose. But she was made for motion and trained for battle, and there still exists a part of her that cannot be satisfied until she uses those talents.

“Two-and-a-half!”

Hime pauses for a sip of her slushie before returning her eyes to the ring. She can’t quite say how she expects the fight to go; she only expects it to be less than orthodox by boxing standards, and blisteringly fast one way or the other. Her main concern is to watch for any unauthorised judo flips or combat rolls.

“Three! Fight!”

As soon as she hears the cry Sora lurches forward half a step before she catches herself. Nath grins. Of _course_ her first instinct is to spring across the ring and put her speed to use in a blitzkrieg assault. It’s not a bad one, either. There are three big advantages Nath has that Sora doesn’t – weight, reach, and a confined space that limits the usefulness of straight-line speed. The weight and the space she can do nothing about, but she can limit the impact of reach by immediately swarming into close quarters where the advantage is smaller. Perhaps, Nath thinks, if she had had more than a fifteen minute primer on boxing movement before they started, she would already be across the ring and throwing short, vicious hooks.

As it is she’s wrong footed and forced to take a slower approach, inching forward in unpredictable increments, her eyes fixed hawkishly on Nath’s gloves, trying to measure the full range of a jab or a straight. The straight, really, is the most important problem. There’s a limit to how much weight Nath can put into a jab and be safe; the power has to come from the arms, and prosthetic arms designed for day to day living won’t have too much in the way of that. A straight, though, will allow her to leverage her weight while keeping her range, and she has plenty of mass to throw around. Try as she might, Sora can’t quite stop herself from clicking her tongue in frustration; this cautious, strategic kind of fight isn’t what she was looking for. She wants to feel the blood roaring through her veins, her heart hammering inside her chest. Now she knows that the itch is there, it’s impossible not to scratch it.

Nath keeps her hands to her chin and waits, patiently, for Sora to close the distance. It’s amazing how the blonde girl, so difficult to understand in any other circumstance, becomes as easy to read as a picture book when she gets in a fight. Her eyes are always darting around, focusing on different things – Nath’s fists, her feet, her body. Overexcited. There’s a nervous energy about her, her movements as taught as a bowstring. It’s a little scary, a little endearing. But very exploitable. Nath counts her breaths, and on the count of three, takes a sudden, explosive step forward.

Sora lunges immediately, pupils dilated, but not quite as immediately as Nath steps back. She finds herself unbalanced, open to assault. In a split-second decision she doubles down and surges forward with even greater abandon, gambling on Nath trying to maintain her distance. It’s a coin flip, but it’s not a good one. Nath’s left glove shoots out to meet her face.

“Tch!”

Nath hisses as she feels her prosthetic arms snap out to their maximum length, an inch or two short of Sora’s face. She misjudged how long her own range was. The girl is going too fast to avoid the punch entirely, but the energy is gone when it hits her, and it isn’t enough to rebuke her assault. She lets the glove roll off her cheek, ducks under the arm and keeps charging. In a whirl of blonde hair she closes the distance and cracks her first, heavy hook into Nath’s midriff.

The pain hits her only a split-second after the punch, and for a moment all Nath can do is wheeze. It was a good punch – shoulder back, with as much weight behind it as Sora could muster. The kind of punch that cracks ribs and knocks the thoughts out of your brain while your body desperately tries to replace the air that just got beaten out of your lungs. A second and third are right behind it, and they’re only a little better than the first – they don’t have the raw momentum from the dash, but now Sora has her feet planted properly and can really put some force into them.

Nath digs deep, and puts the pain away on a shelf in the back of her mind. It’s there, a part of her, but it isn’t useful. She can deal with it later. Sora’s fourth punch isn’t quite as quick and Nath seizes her opportunity while Sora’s gloves are low. This time her jab lands square and stiff, with just enough force to ruin her opponent’s balance. Without a shred of hesitation, she sinks all her weight into an uppercut and delivers it to Sora’s chin, lifting her straight off her feet. She regains her balance quickly enough when they hit the mat again, but it takes her a moment to recover from the shock of the blow, and a moment is all it takes for Nath to sidestep briskly around her and back into a more favourable range.

With the first blows exchanged, the contest begins in earnest. Sora darts forward more boldly, gloves up and ready to catch the jabs she know will come. The force is enough to halt her advance, but only briefly. For all Nath’s advantages in range and weight, the onus of exactitude is weighing heavily on her shoulders. Every mistake is an opportunity for Sora to come crashing in with heavy, withering blows, and the more of them land, the slower Nath’s body reacts the next time. Pressure is everything, and at every possible opportunity Sora rushes forward to apply it, to threaten. Nath’s jabs are not as strong or accurate as she would like, given how new her prosthetics are, and eventually the opportunity will come knocking.

It comes sooner than expected. With Sora always on the assault, it isn’t long before Nath runs out of ring and feels rope at her back. Crackling with energy, her opponent presses the advantage and starts throwing out jabs to the left and right, cutting off her attempts to sidestep and reposition. Sooner or later, Nath knows, one of those jabs will not be a jab, and she won’t be able to turn it aside with her gloves. It’s coming, and the only question is when.

The only way to succeed is to do the unexpected. With Sora’s eyes locked to her feet to predict her sidesteps, Nath sees her opportunity and lunges forward a half step. Sora, for all her strength, is human, and the human brain reacts slower to things that it doesn’t expect to see. By the time Sora looks up, there’s a right cross coming her way with a speed and force that’s too much to stop. She raises her gloves and plants her feet in vain. There’s more weight in that punch than humans were ever meant to have, and when it hits there’s nothing she can do but spiral to the floor like an autumn leaf falling from the tree.

From very far away, it seems – almost a different planet – Hime’s voice barks out a count. Nath breathes in short, heavy pants, cherishing the momentary reprieve. She’s streaming with sweat, her tank top plastered like wet paper against her chest, her back. If her prosthetic arms had skin, it would be glowing with exertion – just like Sora’s. There’s a certain savage beauty to the girl when she rises after four long counts, her gloves held belligerently at her waist before Hime gives the signal. Nath shakes her head and tears her eyes away from Sora’s tank top, sitting flush against the features of her body. Too much sweat. A cocktail of hormones. Not the time.

When the fight resumes, it is mere seconds before Nath realises that something is wrong. When you send a normal human being tumbling to the mat after a punch with half a tonne of weight behind it, they generally don’t get up. They certainly don’t get up and then start moving even faster than they were before they got hit. But Sora is very far away from being a normal human right now. The placid, sleepy girl that Nath has become accustomed is nowhere to be found in her rigid smile, her taut muscles, the glittering of her eyes. For only the second time in ten millennia, Sora is truly, fully awakened.

Nath retreats, gloves up and arms high, fighting for space and distance. But this time, Sora’s advance is too fast, too confident to repulse. She throws jabs as she moves backwards to try and control the space, but to no avail. Sora catches her with her fist out, and tosses a jab to open her up. She tries to weave out of the way, but the blonde girl is already throwing a straight to catch her. Desperately she thrusts her gloves in the way of the blow, and even as she catches it with the soft fabric of the glove, her body reels from the sheer concussive force of the attack. It is then that she knows, unequivocally, that she has lost, that her opponent is now well beyond her means to control.

It is easy, in hindsight, to know her mistake. If her cross – the one, thunderous punch that had knocked Sora to the mat and jostled her into full fury – had been a little bit stronger, maybe it would have knocked the girl out entirely. Perhaps if she had arms of flesh and blood, with thick, stocky muscles instead of delicate mechanisms, it would have been. But her arms were too weak ten thousand years ago, and they’re a hell of a lot weaker now. One way or another, the match has been decided.

The blows begin to fall like forks of lightning from a volatile sky, erratic but with blistering force. There’s no pattern, no strategy. Just energy, instinct. A force of nature. Too fast to resist. Too strong to stop. She dodges and weaves, bobs and blocks, but she’s a big target and there’s only so much she can do. Eventually, she guesses wrong. She sees a curved arm and moves to block a hook, only to realise it’s an overhand crackling towards her face. It’s too late for her to dodge. She moves her gloves to turn the blow aside, but the best she can do is to use her arms to protect her face.

When the blow hits, the sound of an ominous crack fills the air. For a fraction of a second, Sora hesitates, perhaps scared she’s done serious damage. But years of military training and a dose of raw instinct tell her to push her advantage. The window to stop the fight evaporates like rainwater under the Mediterranean sun, and she moves to press her advantage once more.

“ _That’s enough!”_

Hime’s shrill voice distracts her, and she turns her head towards it just in time for the cup of slushee to hit her full in the face. Her world becomes cold and wet; when the shock passes, Hime is still standing at the ringside, her throwing arm down, wearing an expression that mixes worry and fury. The urge to fight dies away.

“ _Auuuuuu._ You got _blue_ in my hair!” she wails.

“Yes, and unless you want your hair to stay that way, I suggest you hit the showers _immediately_. Goodness me, Sora. Were you really going to keep fighting even after you broke her new prosthetics?”

A look of shameful realisation washes over Sora’s face. She takes a sheepish glance at Nath’s left arm, and sees a spiderweb of cracked polymer and exposed metal.

“It’s okay. We were both getting pretty into it,” Nath says, to cool the situation. Inwardly, she breathes a sigh of relief. Better an arm than her face. “Go shower, before we end up with matching hair colours.”

Sora nods, but mouths a dejected ‘sorry’ before she lifts off and flies gently out of the ring to the showers.

“Nice throw,” Nath says to Hime, after watching the blonde girl go. She climbs gingerly out of the ring; her left arm is still responding, but much slower than her right. “You’ve got a good arm on you.”

Hime rolls her eyes. “Yes, well. So have you. _A_ good arm, singular. I knew this was a bad idea.”

“You did say something to that effect.”

“Stress testing new arms by boxing, of all things… And you had to do it with the _one_ girl who hits like a truck and gets carried away with it.”

“Yeah. I get the feeling she was really enjoying herself. Better to have her blow off steam once in a while than to let it get pent up,” Nath replies. “Thanks for the save, by the way. That one looked like it was going to hurt.”

Hime has the good grace to look a little mollified. “You’re quite welcome. Goodness me… I feel like _I’m_ the one who got stressed.”

Nath grins. “And testy. But it’s good data. I needed to know how these things would hold up if somebody was really swinging for me. Not well enough, I guess.”

“Are they not just for everyday living?” Hime asks, eyes narrowed.

“Hm. Sometimes, my life gets a little more interesting than I really want it to. It’s good to be prepared and to know the limits.”

“Well,” Hime says, pausing for a moment to work her thoughts through. “If you ever find yourself armless in a situation where it’s likely to be ‘armful, you can find a perfectly good set attached to Sora. Failing that, Suguri and I would both be more than happy to loan you ours.”

Nath’s answer is slow and deliberate. “I… appreciate the thought. But I like to think that I can fight my own battles.”

“Oh, you can – provided you get to them before we do,” Hime replies, her smile glittering. “You aren’t going to comment on that pun?”

Nath grins. “It was pretty good. I’ll give it a nine out of ten, now that I have enough fingers to count that high.”

“Why, thank you. It was an artisanal pun, you know. You could say it was hand-crafted.”

A moment of silence to let her work sink in, and then Hime moves on to other matters. “By the by, do you plan on using the showers as well?”

“Why? Do I smell?” Nath asks, her voice laden with sarcasm and one fluffy eyebrow definitively raised.

“About as good as you look, which I’m sorry to say is not ideal at the moment. You’ll be nursing some bruises in the morning, I’m afraid,” Hime says, her voice wry.

Nath shrugs, as if to let the joke roll off her shoulders. The shower definitely sounds appealing – cold water to ease her aching bruises and cleanse her burning skin. But her mind jumps, unbidden and insidious, to thoughts of Sora peeling off her tank top and standing bare beneath the spray. She shakes her head, groans. Too much sweat. Too many hormones.

“Maybe in a little bit. I have to disconnect this arm first. Don’t want to get water in the mechanisms. Do me a favour and go grab us some slushees. I’ll pay you back.”

“I shan’t turn down an excuse to add another colour to my tongue. What flavour would you like?”

“Blue, of course.”

* * *

 

Nath finds them waiting for her at the foyer when she finishes her shower. It’s amazing what a measure of cold water has done to her disposition; she feels fresh, and free. Changing out of her tight tank top and into an airy summer dress has definitely helped as well. It’s not often that she appreciates the weird insistence that fashion designers have on sleeves, but they’re not so bad, now she has an opportunity to use them, and they hide the damage to her left arm.

“Sorry. Were you waiting long?” she asks as she approaches.

“ _Muuu_ ,” Sora says, and darts forward for an awkward hug with Nath’s right shoulder. Her hair still smells slightly of blue slushee. “I’m taking you out for ice cream to say sorry. I won the fight, so you can’t say no.”

Nath grins, and pats her on the back. She can feel the silky fabric of Sora’s sundress through the fingertips of her prosthetic arm. For all the imperfections in their design, the ability to actually feel textures is worth more than she can say.

“Well, I’m not saying you _wouldn’t_ have won, but one of you got a face full of slushee and the other one didn’t, so you may have to redefine who the victor actually was,” Hime says, with a slender smile that says her anger at Sora for going over the top has dissipated.

Sora groans. Although she can’t exactly argue, it still strikes her as somewhat of a miscarriage of justice to have a hard-earned victory revoked for a minor misdemeanour like almost killing her opponent. Nath rolls her eyes a little.

“Lucky for you, I’m a benevolent dictator. I’ll allow a mission to procure ice cream.”

“Roger,” Sora says, and peels herself away from Nath’s shoulder. “Nath, which is better – rocky road, or strawberry? It’s important.”

Hime sniffs. “ _Surely_ it has to be strawberry. Not only is strawberry a true classic among ice cream flavours, but it has a refreshing fruity taste perfect for hot days. Rocky road is too stodgy.”

“Not stodgy. Decadent. Ice cream’s meant to be a treat. It should feel like one. Strawberry lacks imagination,” Sora contends hotly.

“Oh, I see. So you think ice cream should only be an occasional thing. Perhaps you just haven’t eaten enough of it to have reached the correct conclusion? Oh, Sora. I didn’t know you were an ice cream novice.”

“I’m not a novice! You just eat too much ice cream so it isn’t special anymore. You don’t appreciate it.”

“Spend ten thousand years as the core of a spaceship, eating nothing but nutrient paste, and _then_ you can tell me I don’t appreciate ice cream.”

“I spent ten thousand years asleep eating nothing. That’s even worse.”

“So you _are_ a novice. Nath, can you please inform Sora that she’s being silly and not appreciating the true majesty of strawberry?”

“Nath, don’t negotiate with terrorists. She’s trying to push her strawberry agenda for nefarious purposes.”

Nath sighs, and feels a sudden pang of pity for Suguri. Sora and Hime are tough to handle on their own without the semi-playful bickering they fall into when they’re together. Although, she admits privately, a lively atmosphere like this isn’t a bad thing.

“Vanilla,” she says.

“V… Vanilla? Well, I mean… It isn’t offensive, but do you not think it lacks a certain specialness?” Hime asks.

Nath shrugs. “I like simple foods and subtle flavours. Strawberry is too in-your-face, and rocky road has too much going on. Vanilla is delicious on its own, but also versatile enough to be a compliment to other, bolder flavours, as well as almost any topping. It has endless possibilities. There are only so many ways to enjoy strawberry and rocky road, but you could have vanilla ice cream day after day and never get bored.”

“That’s cheating,” Hime says, with the pout of woman who knows she has just been outmatched. “We’re trying to bicker here. You’re not allowed to come in and have an actual, cohesive argument.”

Nath raises an eyebrow. “I see. Here’s my other argument: you spent ten thousand years eating nutrient paste, and Sora spent ten thousand years eating nothing. I, on the other hand, spent ten thousand years wandering the earth and sampling its cuisine, and _I_ say that vanilla is better.”

“Ooh. You’re secretly a gourmet. I didn’t even realise,” Sora says, with the same sense of awe usually reserved for superheroes.

They fall into step naturally, Nath in the middle and the other two either side of her, and the conversation flows freely as they thread their way through the winding cobbled streets towards the centre of the town. In the sunlight, the shopfronts are more cheerful and inviting than Nath remembers them; it almost feels like a different town to the one she’s lived in all these years. More alive, and more noisy.

“Nath, Nath,” Sora says, tugging at her sleeve. “Let’s all hold hands. It’s a rare opportunity.”

She frowns. Although it certainly wouldn’t be a punishment to hold hands with two pretty blonde girls in public, she doesn’t like the formation they’re in. If she gives in to a request to hold hands, it will only be a matter of time before one of them suggests skipping, or even worse, singing, neither of which she has any stomach for outside the comforting walls of her own home. The best way to handle the situation, she decides, is to deflect it with a joke.

“It’d be less rare if you didn’t break my arms as soon as I got them,” she says.

“Muu… I said sorry.”

“Speaking of,” she continues, a little more gently, “do you two mind if I drop the broken arm off at my house and then catch up with you later?”

“But what if you get lost on the way back? This town is a maze. Me and Suguri get lost all the time.”

“Which, might I add, baffles me,” Hime says, swooping in to give the tone of the conversation some much needed lift. “I’m from outer space and I still have a better sense of direction than you two. Nath, you go ahead. I’ll escort this one to the ice cream parlour so she doesn’t end up crossing the border.”

“I’ll be quick,” Nath replies, and turns on her heel. She catches Sora’s frown out of the corner of her eye before she leaves, and mouths a quiet apology. A scoop of ice cream will cheer her up.

The way to Nath’s house is not short, but it is at least familiar, and she takes it with a soldier’s brisk stride. She could fly, but on such a warm day, she prefers to keep to ground level and the shade; she wouldn’t be flying high enough for the air to really cool down all that much. It isn’t long before her pace has swallowed up the distance, and her apartment building rises into view.

As she nears the building, she slows her pace. Her apartment is on the very top floor, and it has long been her habit to simply fly up there and let herself in from the balcony rather than to go into the building and up the stairwell. But today she has some business to attend to before she throw off her malfunctioning left arm. She peers into the deep shadows cast by the neighbouring fences, and finds what she’s looking for: a glint of gold in the darkness.

Hesitantly, she frames a question to the open air. “You’re here again today?”

Her answer comes in the form of a grey cat sauntering out of the shadows to meet her. It’s become a fixture of the urban landscape around her apartment, always hiding in corners or sunning itself on the pavement – in between scavenging from their bins, of course. In Nath’s opinion, it can’t be more than a year old – it still has long, gangly legs that the rest of its body hasn’t quite grown into. It doesn’t have a collar, and it seems too thin to have a regular owner, but she can’t quite bring herself to believe it’s a stray. Not when it’s so confident around people, and especially people as large and intimidating as herself.

As the cat begins to wind itself carelessly around her ankles, she quickly sweeps her gaze around. There’s not a living soul to be seen. Good. When she’s satisfied, she slowly crouches and holds out her right prosthetic hand, palm upwards, for the creature to sniff. She’s close enough to see its nose twitching as it does, and feels almost nervous, as if awaiting a judgement.

The tension ends when the cat playfully headbutts her hand, trying to press its nose into her palm. Slowly and gently, hyperaware of her own inexperience in operating the prosthetics, she draws her hand across its back, feeling the texture of short, sun-dappled fur through artificial fingertips. She’s almost surprised when the cat begins to purr.

“Alright, alright. Don’t tell anybody, but I have something for you today,” she says, and starts rummaging in her bag. From underneath her towel and her tank top, she draws out a sachet of cheap cat food. “I’m not supposed to feed strays, you know.”

She doesn’t know why she’s telling a cat this. It certainly doesn’t care about the morality of the situation. But its eyes seem to almost glitter when it spies the packet of food, and before long it is reading up on its hind legs to brush its face against the packet, even trying to bat it out of her fingers with its paws. Upon seeing it closely, she’s almost sure it’s male.

“Settle down. Let me see here,” Nath murmurs, her sticking her tongue out of one corner of her mouth. She’s sure the packets are just meant to be torn open at the top. It’s a little while before she can manoeuvre her stricken left arm into position, and grasp the pouch between finger and thumb, but once she’s done it she manages to open the packet cleanly and empty the contents onto the ground.

“Sorry. I don’t have a bowl,” she says quietly, to a cat that that is currently trying to purr and eat at the same time, coming out with a broken rumble. “I bet you eat off the floor all the time anyway. That stuff stinks, too. You sure seem to like it, though.”

More purrs, and the occasional snaffle. She’s never seen a creature eat so fast, and somehow it strikes her as very sad. It must be a tomcat, she realises.

“Of course you like it, don’t you? It’s better than eating thrown-out food all day. He says, ‘Yes, I like real food. I am the king of cats. Listen to the song of my people. The words are purr, purr, purr,’” she says, adopting a nasally tone for the cat. “It’s a very cute song, Mister Cat. Oh, wait. It should be Your Majesty, shouldn’t it?”

“…Nath?”

Her reaction is immediate, and unfortunate. She springs to her feet and whirls around, cheeks burning, to find Sora hovering in what had been her blind spot. Her sudden movements scare the cat, who looks for a moment as if he might bolt away; instead, the feline settles for continuing to eat, but growling fiercely in between mouthfuls.

“You’re meant to be eating ice cream. Why did you follow me? How much did you hear?” she asks, trying to keep the note of accusation of her voice.

If she’s offended by the brisk questioning, Sora doesn’t show it. “I came to ask what ice cream you wanted, so we could order when we got there. I flew so it’d be faster. Is this your cat?”

“I – he’s – No, no. It’s not my cat, it’s just _a_ cat. I keep seeing it around so I thought I’d say hello to it. I, uh, don’t _normally_ do this. I’m not that kind of person. Y’know, that does the… uh… cat… baby talk… thing.”

She’s babbling, and her babbling is digging a grave for her dignity to lie in. She feels absolutely mortified. The _one_ time she stops to talk to the damn cat, she’s ambushed by one of the few people whose opinions she actually cares about. Typical.

“Of course. He’s not a baby. He’s the king,” Sora nods sagely. “He must’ve been hungry. He’s eaten it already.”

Sure enough, the food is gone, and the cat has begun to occupy himself with sniffing at Nath’s sandals, with the occasional glance over at Sora.

Nath sighs, and uses her right arm to scratch the back of her head in a motion that feels natural but unnatural at the same time. “Listen, um… Don’t talk about this. It’s embarrassing. For me.”

“Why? You fed a cat. The cat is cute. I don’t get it.”

“Just humour me, alright?”

“Mm. You’re a benevolent dictator, so okay,” Sora says after a moment of hesitation, and puts her hand over her mouth to signal that the secret is safe.

They’re interrupted by a stern ‘ _nyaaa_ ’ from about ankle height. Almost by instinct, Nath drops to her knees to stroke the cat, who leans his body clumsily into her hand, purring with satisfaction. Her cheeks continue to burn with embarrassment, and she studiously avoids looking at Sora and instead absorbs herself in noting the colouring of the animal: grey fur with the occasional white stripe, dark ears, white splotches under the chin. She seems them close up when, to her surprise, the cat puts its forepaws on her knee and reaches up to lick her eyebrows.

“Um, Nath?” Sora asks, kneeling down with her.

“Yes?” she replies, when the cat is done grooming her with its warm, scratchy tongue.

“N… Nyah.”

There’s a moment of silence. Nath turns to Sora and finds that the blonde girl’s cheeks have turned exactly the same colour as her own. “Uh… what?”

“Don’t make me do it again!” the girl says, and throws a frustrated punch at Nath’s shoulder. “You pet _his_ head when _he_ meows, but you won’t pet mine? Racist!”

Despite everything, Nath allows herself a chuckle as she reaches over and runs her hand gently through Sora’s fluffy hair. “Alright. Let’s make a deal. You don’t tell Hime I was making conversation with a weird cat, and I won’t tell her you were jealous of him. Deal?”

Sora pouts, but gently pushes her head up into Nath’s palm. “Deal.”

“Alright. Sorry, cat, but the party’s over. Come back tomorrow and maybe I’ll have some more food,” she says, climbing to her feet. “Sora, you might as well come in and help me disconnect this arm, and then we can go get ice cream.”

“Roger,” Sora says, lifting off. “Hey, what are you going to call him? The cat, I mean. I think you should call him Major.”

“He’s not big enough to be a major. Besides, he isn’t even my cat.”

“I think you’re his human, though. That’s how cats work.”

“How would you know? You’ve been asleep for ten thousand years.”

“Cats sleep a lot, too. We’re on the same wavelength.”

Nath sighs contentedly. She feels tired, but the sun is still high, and she has so much left to do. There’s data that needs to be sent back to the prosthetics manufacturer. Then she has to educate her friends on the majesty of vanilla ice cream. Her world seems to have gotten so much livelier since she saw Sora wandering around through the whims of chance. It’s fun, but hard work.

But, thankfully, not hard enough that she forgets to buy some cat food on the way home.


	19. Traditional

Sora, Nath has begun to observe, has a very particular way of phrasing things. Perhaps it’s because she’s unfamiliar with the language; perhaps it’s simply her nature. But when Sora gives out an invite, it’s never for the thing she says it is. “Agricultural studies” becomes picking berries by the river. “Fighting robots” turns into an afternoon at the batting cage, facing down the pitching machine. “Advanced inter-spherical manoeuvres” is actually throwing yourself into ball pit and swimming through the resulting combination of plastic and confused five-year-olds.

“I thought we were ‘treasure hunting’?” Nath asks, when she’s presented with a feather duster.

Sora nods. “Mm. First we clean the treasure, then we hunt it.”

Of course, the easiest option is to find Hime, who usually tells it roughly like it is, but Hime has strapped herself into a hazmat suit, and everything she says comes out with both an echo and a muffle, which is a small miracle of nature. “We’re cleaning the attic,” she says, using a combination of sound and hand gestures.

Suguri, as it turns out, has a very laissez faire attitude to attic management. If the attic leaves her alone, she leaves it alone. Apart from when she puts things inside it, and then takes them out again decades later.

“I do some light cleaning every fifty years. There’s nothing to worry about,” the silver haired girl says, strapping a pistol to her thigh. “Hime just wants to do a clear-out. That’s all.”

This is enough to convince Nath that wielding a feather duster with her teeth is, perhaps, not what she wants to do with her day, and she bravely volunteers to stay downstairs and sort… whatever it is that gets thrown down at her.

“Good idea. Nath’s a gourmet, so she can figure out what’s good,” Sora replies.

“I’m pretty sure she’s not going to _eat_ it, Sora.”

“Nath, don’t let Hime tell you what to do. You can eat the treasure if you want.”

“I’d like it if she didn’t. Some of that stuff is important.”

“Yes, yes, Suguri. Important enough to be put in the attic and not looked at for half a century. Well, ladies, shall we begin?”

With no further ado, all three are up the ladder and rummaging, their footsteps booming like an elephant’s through the ceiling above. Nath waits patiently for the first thing to go wrong, and she is, of course, rewarded quite swiftly.

“Hime,” Sora’s voice says softly. “There’s a huge spider on your back.”

“...ahahahahaa. W-well, a spider is nothing, really. How huge is ‘huge’, if you don’t mind…?”

“I saw one like it in the nature magazine. They eat birds.”

Even through the floorboards, Hime’s intake of breath is audible. “ _Suguri._ Can you please _do something_ about this huge, venomous Earth creature you’ve cultivated in your attic? Immediately, perhaps?”

“...Should I shoot it?” Suguri says, calm but audibly amused.

“It’s okay, Hime. In the magazine, it said the venom wasn’t that bad. They just have really big teeth for a spider. They can bite through a mouse’s skull.”

“ _Sora._ ”

“They can also fire their hair at you, like little arrows, and it really hurts. Nature is amazing.”

“ _Sora!”_

“Do you think this one can fly? Some spiders can fly, but I think this one is too heav–”

The conversation is interrupted by Hime descending the attic ladder at Mach one, hurtling out of the front door, hurling what must be a very confused spider toward the horizon and then rushing back up to the attic. Nath counts one, two seconds, and then hears a heavy thud – suspiciously like the sound of Sora being hit with a flying dropkick.

The work continues, although occasionally Suguri pops her face (which is so grey with dust that it matches her hair) out of the attic door, with requests like:  
“Nath. Could you please fetch me the bolt cutters from the kitchen?”

“Nath. Can you bring me a pitcher of lemonade, please? We need something acidic.”

“Nath. There should be a pickaxe in the tool closet. Can you bring it?”

Eventually – just as she thinks Suguri will ask her for a black powder keg and a few blasting caps – Nath sees Sora’s head poke out of the attic. She looks as though she’s been working in a coal mine. “We found some treasure. We just need to finish prying it loose, and then I’ll bring it down.”

Nath’s eyebrow twitches. “I… look forward to it?”

“Mm,” Sora nods. “By the way. Do you have another pickaxe?”

“Not that I know of.”

“…Do you know how to repair a broken one?”

“No.”

“Muuuu,” Sora says, and retreats back into the attic.

After another ten minutes of banging, muffled shouting, and what Nath _hopes_ isn’t the sound of Hime weeping openly in the confines of her suit, Sora appears carrying what looks may have once upon a time been a box, but is now some sort of half-fossilised table ornament with an indent full of blocky plastic. Blocky plastic that Nath has seen before.

“We excavated Suguri’s old games consoles. She says there’s some real classics,” Sora says, although she looks just a touch doubtful at how much joy a plastic box and some game discs could give her. “Let’s set it up in the living room. I think they’re digging out the peripherals now.”

“Maybe you should wash your face, first. You look like they just dug _you_ up, like a potato.”

Sora’s pout is almost lost in the smudgy darkness of her face. “Potatoes are a noble tuber. They taste good, they have at least one vitamin, and they’re only poisonous sometimes.”

Despite her impassioned defence of the humble potato, she trots toward the bathroom with her hair wrapped in a skein of cobwebs – hopefully provided by rather smaller spiders than the one that Hime found. Short of any more howls of terror coming from upstairs, Nath decides that the time is right to go down and – as the expression goes – put her feet up.

* * *

 

If a look can tell a story, then Hime’s expression is a three book tragedy set in an alternative timeline where she and Suguri didn’t have such a deep and affectionate friendship, that friendship being perhaps the only reason that Present Timeline Suguri is still alive (as opposed to being found hanging on the nearest tree with a noose made of Binding Chains).

“I said I’m sorry,” Suguri pleads, gently. “I’ll clean the attic more often. Maybe once a decade?”

“I suppose I can accept that,” Hime says darkly, “provided that this decade’s cleaning begins tomorrow and is finished within two weeks. If not, I have half a mind to go up there and clean it myself – with the proper tools, of course. You _did_ keep that flamethrower, didn’t you?”

Suguri winces. “I did, but… Ah. Why not try out the video games, and talk about it later?”

It’s amazing, Nath thinks, how the feel of a room can be changed by a simple rearranging of furniture. A flatscreen TV, rescued from the depths of the attics, has been haphazardly propped up on a mound of Hime’s books, with the boxy little games console at the foot of the literary mountain. The loveseat, the beanbag and the barstool have all been arrayed around it; although the rest of the room feels very bare, that particular corner now feels very cosy. Very social.

“Children and guests first. Sora, Nath, the hotseat is yours. As for me, I believe I shall man the beanbag,” Hime says, curling up in its poofy, fabric embrace.

Sora takes her spot on the loveseat, and for a moment, Nath almost feels a faint air of bafflement surround the girl. But then, she is at any one time either baffled or baffling. She turns and looks up at Suguri, perched on her barstool, with a quiet frown.

“Where’s the helmet?” Sora asks.

Suguri blinks. Slowly. “Helmet?”

“I… don’t really get it, but it’s some kind of simulator, right? So there must be a helmet. Hm. Or maybe this thing–” She prods the console with her toe. “Maybe this is some kind of holodeck box? But the room’s way too small for that…”

Suguri’s ahoge straightens suddenly. “Oh! I get it. It’s not a sim. It’s a little more old fashioned.”

“You’re not kidding,” Nath murmurs, easing herself onto the loveseat. Her legs feel much too long for this kind of thing. “Things like this were old fashioned even when I was young.”

“They became retro and trendy after awhile, and I got into them. It’s swinging back towards sims, nowadays,” Suguri shrugs. “Just pick a disc, put it into the machine, and press the button. You’ll figure it out.”

The next minutes are taken up by quiet confusion, the blowing of ventricles and the wiping of discs. Eventually, the console flickers to life, and the TV starts to play a catchy, faintly annoying jingle as cars that haven’t been seen for hundreds of years roar across the screen.

“Oh, you picked the racing game. Nice choice,” Suguri says.

“This is racing?” Hime asks. “But they’re all going so slowly.”

“It… probably looks fast to regular humans.”

“H… How do I drive? Nath, can you drive? Teach me,” Sora says, upon stumbling her way through the menus.

“Hmm… Can I drive? I’m not really sure. I know I’ve never driven a car, but I remember at least one country where I was legally considered a forklift, and I had to get a license to ‘operate’ myself. I don’t think that country exists anymore, though,” Nath says, standing up. “Suguri, you take the controller and teach her the ropes. I’ll watch.”

Suguri ducks into the vacated seat and begins a rapid-fire explanation of the controls and concepts of the game, and of cars in general. For a moment Nath thinks she’s going to go one level deeper and start explaining things on the level of basic physics, but Sora nods as if to say that although a lot of things are going above her head, they’re not so very high that she can’t catch them with a little practice. The controller changes hands as they alternate laps of the practice course; Suguri kisses the apex of every turn as if it were her first born child, while Sora happens upon the tactic of bouncing into the walls until she’s pointing in roughly the correct direction. There is a long, slow lap just after Suguri explains the difference between front wheel, rear wheel, and four wheel drive; Sora’s car has four wheel drive, so she naturally assumes that it has all the torque and traction of a farm tractor and drives it straight through the gravel in lieu of turning.

“I don’t get why I have to brake. I thought I was supposed to try to go fast,” she says, before ploughing into the barriers at a hairpin turn. She leans her body in the seat as she turns, and Nath can’t help but grin. Of _course_ Sora would be the full-body kind of player. “I go a lot faster than this when I fly, and I never crash or need brakes. Cars are weird.”

As Suguri answers, Nath can’t help but notice that the silver haired girl is leaning into the direction of the turns, too. Before she knows it, she’s watching the players more than she’s watching the screen – two girls with wide eyes and flowing hair, twisting and turning in sympathy with a car that doesn’t exist in any world but the virtual.

“Silly, aren’t they?” Hime whispers across to her. “It’s good to see them like this, though. Suguri is usually so reserved, but we seem to have stumbled upon her hidden weakness.”

“Mm. I’m glad I came. Even though all I’ve done is sit down.”

Perhaps they were a little too loud. Suguri shifts her weight almost imperceptibly in her seat. “Oh. Sorry. We’re leaving you two out, aren’t we? Here. I’ll set it up for a race. Nath, you can play Sora. It wouldn’t be fair for me to race her.”

Nath sighs, and gets to her feet. She was bound to have to do some work eventually. She sits on the floor instead of the couch, and feels a strong, momentary temptation to use Sora’s knees as a headrest. “By the way, Suguri,” she says as casually as she’s able. “What’s your best time on the Mountain Loop Circuit?”

There is a moment of silence as the penny drops. “Two minutes thirteen.”

“Pretty impressive. I got two-oh-nine once. That was a long time ago, though. I figured that if I was going to make the effort to learn to use a pad with my feet, I might as well get good at it,” she replies. “I got rid of all my consoles because I was wasting too much time on them. Even though that was why I got them to begin with.”

“Wine _and_ video games…? Nath, you have bad habits,” Sora scolds gently. She reaches out and ruffles her friend’s hair a little.

Nath grins. “ _Had_ bad habits. They’re under control. Here. Try and follow my line, and brake when I do. I’ll show you how to beat Suguri, no problem.”

“Teach me, Sensei.”

Nath begins to set a line, sweeping up the half-seconds left behind from Suguri’s method, and her student follows, learning quickly. Before long, even Sora is beginning to break a record here and there.

“Don’t worry, Suguri,” Hime whispers, taking her hand. “ _I’ll_ still let you beat me at videogames. Sometimes, at least.”

The silver-haired girl grimaces. “Thanks. Although I might put them back in the attic at this rate.”

“Oh, not before I’ve had a turn, I hope.”

“I guess… what kind of games do you like to play?”

Hime turns, and touches her finger to her chin in contrived thought. Eventually she says, Suguri’s hand still wrapped in hers:

“Why, a dating sim, of course.”


	20. Souvenirs

Suguri’s footsteps are quiet as she trudges up the path to the house. A house in the middle of nowhere, perched atop a hill. She often wonders why it is that she chose to live there, of all places, but she has simply lived there for so long that the reason no longer matters. It is close to the earth, and close to the sky, and perhaps that was all she ever needed for so long a time.

She draws the collar of her coat up to her nose. The air is cold, but still; the countryside from the air is a patchwork of witch hazel and camellia. They are standing on the edge of spring. In the country she has just left, winter has not yet seen fit to releases its grasp, and the frigid winds were like claws raking across her body. Here, the air is more gentle, even in the pale moonlight of the evening.

When she reaches the door, she wonders briefly whether she should knock. On one hand, it _is_ her house, but she’s given no advance warning of her return, and she feels that being mistaken for an intruder by Hime (or worse, Sora) could be a painful experience. On the other hand, it is late at night, and she doesn’t want to disturb their sleep, and perhaps they’ll be pleasantly surprised to find her there in the morning.

In the end, she decides on quiet, and turns her key soundlessly in the door. As soon as she steps into the house, a great weariness falls upon her, like snow on the face of a mountain. She is home now. She can rest. She quietly sinks to the floor and begins the laborious process of disentangling her feet from her winter boots, carelessly shrugging off her rucksack full of souvenirs as she does. It hits the ground with a soft thump, and for a moment she listens intently for a response. After a few seconds punctuated only by Sora’s quiet breathing from the living room, she resumes fiddling with her laces. She has just managed to remove her first boot when a voice drifts, like smoke across a waning moon, from the living room.

“Suguri?”

Her heart beats painfully, a little heavily, in her chest. _So this is what it feels like,_ she thinks. _To come home to somebody._ Her fingers forget what they are doing; she stands almost without meaning to, balancing on uneven feet. Her mouth forms the word without her input, so naturally. As if she were born with it on her lips. “Hime.”

As if conjured by her name she appears, floating soundlessly from the gloom of the living room. In her nightgown, she seems more like an elf or a fairy than a human being. Her eyes seem a little tired, and perhaps that is all that convinces Suguri that she is not an illusion or a dream. Now that she is in the light, her movements are a little stiff, as if she is trying with all her might not to break into a run.

The seconds blur together, like somebody is skipping through the frames. One moment Suguri is standing still, and the next she is walking towards Hime, falling towards her, as if being led by the hand, as if being caught by gravity. She blinks and Hime’s cheek is against hers, Hime’s hands on her waist, Hime’s breath falling in ragged gasps as she searches for words and finds none sufficient. Their bodies press together, moulding against each other, until they sit cleanly against each other like pieces of a jigsaw.

In the future, Suguri will come to realise that they were not hugging, but embracing as lovers do.

“I missed you,” Hime says, her hands brushing through Suguri’s long, silver hair. She curls a lock of it around her forefinger, and fiddles with the curl.

“I missed you too.”

“Not enough,” she says with a contented sigh, the mischief returning to her voice. “Otherwise you would march straight up to the bedroom and announce yourself, rather than sneaking in like a thief in the night. Very disappointing. You must try to miss me more, next time.”

“I’ll do my best. I though you’d be asleep,” Suguri says, hiding her grin by burying her face in Hime’s shoulder.

“The bed is too large to sleep in alone. I was just dozing off in the loveseat when you came in. Is it cold out there? Your cheeks are cold.”

“They’re warmer now.”

“Because you’re blushing.”

“Because I’m blushing,” Suguri nods, and – with more reluctance than she thought she’d have – disentangles herself from her friend. “How have things been while I was away?”

Hime’s eyes flicker to the side as she arranges her thoughts. “Hmm… Sora has been keeping me entertained, I suppose. Thunderstorms and boxing matches, that kind of thing. She got carried away and broke Nath’s arm.”

Suguri tilts her head. “Nath doesn’t have arms.”

“Well, she doesn’t anymore. Now she just has arm, singular.”

“That’s still more than she started with.”

Hime touches her fingertips to her mouth as she changes the subject. “It was nice to have time to myself for the first few days, but… I really wished you were here. How was your trip?”

The silver haired girl frowns. It was a bust, she explains. Her existing contacts just don’t have any information on the group she’s keeping an eye on, and she wasn’t able to dig up anything herself. “It’s frustrating. I don’t know where to look from here. There’s a ‘peacekeeping’ organisation over in Port City that might know. But they’re pretty insular. Surveillance, wetworks. I hear they sometimes oversee hostage negotiations. They won’t talk to me.”

“Port City…? Hm. You might try Iru. She wrote to me a while ago saying she’d been offered a job near there, but didn’t say what it was. Given her skill set…” Hime trails off, but the implication is clear. There aren’t too many niches available for a sniping specialist, but surveillance and policing hostage situations would definitely be two of them.

“Hah,” Suguri sighs. “I took such a long trip, but it turns out I should have just asked you instead.”

Hime flashes her a mischievous smile. “Well, of course. I am, after all, quite intelligent.”

“Yes.”

“And quite beautiful.”

“Yes.”

“You’re going to keep saying yes, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Ohohoho. In that case, could you please undress for me? Slowly, if you wouldn’t mind.”

“Pass.”

“Oh, boo. Let’s wake Sora up, then. She’ll be glad to see you.”

Once again she feels she’s being led by the hand, pulled in by Hime’s gravity. In truth, she almost doesn’t want to wake Sora up. There was something enjoyable about the hushed whispers, the private back and forth. But she follows anyway in Hime’s wake, and watches her gently nudging Sora’s sleeping shoulder.

“Sora. Sora. Suguri’s home.”

After half a minute of determined prodding, Sora excavates her face from her beanbag pillow and looks up into the half-light. Her mouth falls open in a tiny ‘o’, her eyes still half shut, her expression blank. Then, she pronounces, with utmost seriousness: “Suguri. Somebody stole your boot.”

“…Not quite,” Suguri says, having momentarily forgotten that she’s only wearing one. “But that reminds me. I have souvenirs.”

At the mention of souvenirs, all traces of sleepiness vanish from Sora’s face – and from Hime’s, for that matter. Suddenly, their attention is quite undivided. She smiles indulgently. In the end, this is a household of ancient children, after all. She disappears into the entryway and returns with her rucksack full of treasures and trinkets.

“Now, Sora. I got you one big thing. Before I give it to you, what do you think it is?” Suguri asks. It isn’t often that she teases people, but it’s fine to have some fun from time to time.

Sora closes her eyes, and when they open again after a moment or two of deep thought, they are full of excitement. Her face lights up in a beatific smile, her hands curl into balls, and her voice her voice has the same tone as a child who’s been told she’s getting a puppy. “ _A grenade!_ ”

“Ah… This one really was born in a bad time, wasn’t she? Ahaha… ha…” Hime says, poking a hole through the resulting awkward silence.

“Muuuu… What could be as good as a grenade…? Ah! It’s an ice cream maker!”

“It’s an ice cream maker?!” Hime gasps.

“It’s not an ice cream maker.”

“It’s _not_ an ice cream maker?!”

“No,” Suguri says, pressing a hand to her forehead. She withdraws from her bag a rounded package of some shiny, pale blue fabric. “It’s a sleeping bag. I thought it might be getting a little cold at night, so it’ll help keep you warm.”

A rush of excited questions begin to tumble out of the blonde girl’s mouth. How many seasons is it rated for? What’s the comfort temperature? Is it a square type, or a mummy bag? Mummy bags, she informs them gravely, are by the far the best. Soon enough she is wriggling across the floor in her sleeping bag like a big, sky-blue worm, which Suguri rather suspects will be her default mode of locomotion for a while.

“Suguri, you’re the best,” she says, looking up from ankle-height with a satisfied smile. “It’s very snuggly.”

“You’re… uh, welcome,” Suguri replies, having not expected such a rapturous response to a piece of camping gear.

“I still don’t quite understand that girl, but the outcome was very good,” Hime whispers. “I don’t suppose you have an ice-cream maker in there for _me_ , by any chance?”

“...You _do_ know you can make ice cream without a machine, right?”

Hime’s assumes the controlled, level expression of somebody who is screaming internally and wants to keep it that way. “I see. This requires my attention. Perhaps my immediate attention.”

“We can look some up on the computer later.”

“But then we can’t watch cat videos! What kind of cruel world forces a woman to choose between ice cream and cats?” she pouts.

“Nath has a cat. She’s pretending she doesn’t, though. He’s very cute and I want to call him Major if she doesn’t think of a good name,” Sora’s voice says from somewhere very close to the floorboards.

Hime sighs. “I’m sorry, Suguri. You leave for only a week or two and you come back to a world of secret cats and sleeping bag floor snakes.”

“Hissss.”

Suguri smiles and waits for the commotion to die down before withdrawing a heavy leather pouch from her rucksack. From it, she extracts a camera and places it into Hime’s open palm. “I got you two things. This is the first.”

The dancer looks at the camera in her hand, then deep into Suguri’s eyes, and then back to the camera. “You do realise what you are doing?”

“I’m making me and Sora the most photographed people on the planet?”

Hime’s eyes begin to glitter, and her tone is as indulgent as rich chocolate. “Oh yes. You two are going to feel like idols. My first order of business shall be to take some photographs of your cute sleeping face, Suguri.”

She scratches the back of her head, and finds a blush creeping to her cheeks. “I don’t understand why. You see it every morning.”

“I’ve missed it lately,” Hime replies, and there is a faint tremble to her lip.

“Ah… Maybe I should start getting up earlier…”

“Please do – then we can spend the morning together. I love it when every possible outcome is a positive one. It’s so very neat and tidy,” the blonde says, turning the camera over and over in her hands, testing the weight of it. “By the way, you said you had something else?”

“Mm. It’s not something I can hand to you, though,” Suguri replies, feeling uncharacteristically sheepish. “I booked a reservation for us in a restaurant in the next town over. It’s… a little fancy, so it’ll be a nice excuse to wear good clothes.”

A contented smile graces Hime’s lips. “A rare opportunity to see you wearing clothes other than your jacket? My heart is pounding already.”

Sora yawns, in the whole hearted, unapologetic way that dogs and cats do, and receives the same sentiments back from her friends. The night is long, and the moon is high; even souvenirs cannot cure them of their need for sleep. As Hime and Suguri make their way upstairs, to warmth and to bed, Suguri ponders an important question.

“Hime? How many pillows are left in the pillow wall?”

“Oh… Well, about that. We were, I’m afraid, struck by a number of ferocious pillow bandits. It was dreadful. They simply overpowered me and Sora, and vanished into the night with all of our excess pillows. The world is such a chaotic place nowadays.”

“I… see,” Suguri frowns. “And I suppose Sora will agree with you on this?”

Hime’s eyes twinkle in the half-light. “For the privilege of eating her favourite breakfast four days in a row, I find there’s not much that Sora _won’t_ agree with.”

Suguri sighs. She expected spmething like this. But the night, she reminds herself, is cold, and Hime is very warm. Besides, they trust each other with so many things. Surely her back can be one of them.

Perhaps it won’t be such a big deal after all.


	21. Fishing Trip

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Small note: I wrote this before AoS2 was released on steam, and it became apparent that Iru is actually Goku, so her characterisation is very off.

They sit back to back in the salt air, knees curled tight to squash themselves into the tiny boat. The spray, icy even in the summer, is as cutting as glass now that winter has begun to bite. But for all that it is sunny, and the cumulus clouds in the distance are holding steady at the horizon. The sea is calm, and waves sweep across the surface as gently as dust is swept across the plains, with only wisps of foam to say that they were ever there at all.

“Nice day for fishing, huh?” Iru asks. Their shoulder-blades are touching, and Suguri feels the vibration of Iru’s voice pass through her when she speaks. She is slim but her voice is low, almost baritone, in a way that reminds Suguri of rich, dark wood. A warm, comfortable, solid kind of voice, that makes it even more surprising when she shoots you in the face.

Suguri says nothing in reply, and instead fights to keep her rod still. It’s far too long for her tastes, and unwieldy – like that strange, oversized sword they found Sora with. She’s tried to use it a few times herself in practice, but the length and weight make it tough to shift momentum at full speed, and it being two-handed makes it tricky to switch to a rifle at medium range. Even Sora’s regular beam sword is a little heavier than hers, with a higher output than she would be comfortable using. That, she supposes, is the difference between a weapon made to defend people and a weapon meant to kill them.

“Hey. What’s up? Catfish got your tongue?” Iru’s voice again, still warm, still mellow. She knows without looking that Iru’s rod will be perfectly still, held by hands much steadier than her own. “Loosen up. Half the fun of fishing is yapping to the person next to you.”

Her brow furrows. “Even if you say that…” she begins, but leaves the sentence unfinished. _It’s awkward, because I didn’t come here to fish. I didn’t even come here to talk. I came for information._

She sighs into the morning light, and watches her breath disperse as haze. Port City is still visible on the horizon. The buildings, with their clean edges and brilliant white paint, draw the dawn’s colour into themselves as if drinking it from the air. Solar panels in brilliant blue wink from every rooftop. It’s perhaps one of the most technologically advanced places on the planet, discounting her own residence; somewhere, nestled deep within the beating heart of that city, is the peacekeeping organisation that Iru works for. Their logo, a set of strange characters emblazoned over a planet, is stitched on the breast of Iru’s jacket, and Suguri wonders whether it was the cold or some other purpose that informed her fashion decisions.

Iru shifts her weight in the tiny boat, putting her feet up on the gunwales and leaning into the small of Suguri’s back. “Hey, I got a question for ya.”

“Mm?”

“How many times a year do you think I go fishing?”

Suguri frowns. It’s a strange question to ask out of the blue, but she can at least hazard a guess. She looks backwards at Iru, who has set down her rod and rolled up her sleeves. She doesn’t have the tanned, muscular forearms of a fisherman. Or, come to think of it, a particularly large selection of baits and tackles. In fact, wasn’t there a rental store near the docks with these very rods proudly displayed in the windows? It’s a strange time of year for a fishing trip, too; only cod in the water, and probably too deep for such a small boat and such basic equipment.

“Never?”

“Bullseye,” Iru says, and it sounds easy and practised. Rehearsed. “I’ve never been fishing before. I wouldn’t mind trying my hand at lake fishing or something, but sea fishing is a little much. Hey, speaking of, there’s a box of seasickness tabs in the bait box, under the little… uh, gummy-worm lookin’ things. Could you pass ’em over?”

“You get seasick?”

“A little. Not enough that I yak, but it weirds me out when I can’t get a stable position.”

A silence settles over the boat as Iru downs a few tablets with a hit of water from a flask. Suguri sets down her rod – gently, because she’s now absolutely sure it’s a rental – and turns to face her companion. For all her calm demeanour, Iru’s face is a little pale and drawn, and her hair a little messy. There are goosebumps trickling across her forearms where she’s rolled up the sleeves of her jacket.

“So, uh. Sorry for all the rigmarole. I’m not really into this cloak and dagger thing, so I wanted to cut it short. Basically, you’ve been asking around some stuff, yeah? Security stuff, I mean.”

“You could say that,” Suguri murmurs.

“Well. It puts us in an awkward position. Y’see, we have some information we’d quite like you to have, because you’re a known quantity, right? But officially, we can’t give it to you, because you’re not affiliated with us. And on the other hand, there’s a couple questions we wanna ask you.”

She nods her head, slowly. “I see. Hard to know what gets said between two friends on a fishing trip, out in the ocean.”

Iru flips over and grins. “You got it. No espionage here. Just two good friends, sharing a boat and talking about whatever they feel like,” she says, and then, in a stage whisper: “I’m sure glad it’s you I’m talking with. I could imagine this going wrong with somebody less reasonable.” She clears her throat, and her voice falls back to its normal volume. “So, how’s life been treating you? Heard you got a new lodger a while back. Girl with long blonde hair, right?”

Suguri fights the urge to roll her eyes; she’d rather not carry on with the coded conversation conceit. But there’s a certain playfulness to Iru’s voice, tempered with caution, so she decides to play along.

“She’s more of a family member,” Suguri says, emphasising the last two words. “She used to be a soldier, but she’s retired now. She can still handle herself.” Translation: _She’s harmless, but if you come after her, you’re going to regret it._

“Ohh. Sounds like a real tough customer. It’s great that you’re so close. Between you, Hime, and this girl, you must have the safest house in the world. Is there anything that could even worry you, security-wise?” Iru asks. It’s a hook, blatantly designed to draw out a question, and Suguri is happy to take it.

“Well. There’s an organisation I’m keeping tabs on. They look kind of shady.”

“Those Pandora creeps, right? Yeah, somebody in our office worries about them, too. Aren’t they on offshoot from that Regressionist political party, the Sons of the Earth? Must have some friends in high government to get the kind of kit those guys are running around with. Oh, hey. Speaking of kit, how’s that blue-haired girl you hang around with? I’ve heard she’s a tech investor. Prosthetics or something.”

Suguri’s eyes narrow. Of _course_ the Regressionists would be part of it. Regressionism was the belief – very popular after the Great War, and enjoying a brief resurgence after Suguri’s own Little War showcased the deadliness of robots – that humanity’s reliance on technology had impacted their ability to act morally, and that only by forsaking new technology and living closer to nature could mankind atone for the sins it had committed. It wasn’t a belief that particularly impressed her; she was of the opinion that saying technology had corrupted man was a little like somebody smashing a window and then blaming the hammer – a pretty way to avoid responsibility, and not more than that.

To be absolutely fair, she is biased. As an altered human, she is a symbol of humanity’s harmony with technology, a reminder of what they could achieve – what they could _be_ – if they had the wisdom to be trusted with it. That fact brought her into conflict with Regressionist factions more than a few times across the ages, some of which she had been able to resolve peacefully, and others not so much. She did accept that without technology, mankind would never have been able to do quite the damage it had to itself and the world at large, but her counterpoint was that without the advanced technology made by her father, much of the world would still be in ruins. Relying on older, less efficient technology instead of innovating was also likely to do more damage overall than moving to cleaner models.

“Sorry. I was thinking,” she says, when she realises that Iru is still waiting for an answer. “Yes. She’s fine. Another old soldier, although I haven’t personally seen her fight. We’re very fond of her.”

“I can imagine. Well, from what we’ve been able to see, she’s the type to keep herself to herself. I heard she had some real adventures in the past, though. Those Pandora guys seem pretty interested in that,” Iru says, and her eyes are very meaningful. “Keep an eye out for her.”

Suguri nods slowly, and touches the laser sword at her hip. “Got it.”

A few moments of silence, cradled by the waves. She wonders if the exchange is over; if so, then she can’t complain. It’s been fruitful, and she has enough information to dig a little further. As well as a warning to relay to Nath. A good day’s work.

“Oh, I did have another question for you. How’re you and Hime getting along?” Iru asks. There is a quiet little smirk playing on her lips.

“…I don’t get the code. What’s the real question?”

The green-haired girl holds her hand up, shakes her head. “Nah, nah. No code. I’m just curious. Hime is… well, for all the people who were aboard that spaceship, Hime’s our big sis.”

Suguri thrusts her hands into the pockets of her coat. “We get along fine.”

“So I’ve heard.” The tone is alluring, almost taunting. Against her better instincts, Suguri bites.

“You’ve _heard_?”

“Yeah. I got a call from Nanako the other day. She said you all went to the beach, and Hime spent all day flirting with you.”

Suguri groans, but beneath her irritation from being gossiped about there are fond memories floating to the surface – a long, easy, blissful day. The sand, and the waves, and voices of friends. Hime, with her dreamy voice, opening her heart beneath the sun, talking to her so intimately and openly. Hime’s hands, drifting across her back, and her shoulders, and down to her hips, so gentle, so natural. They haven’t spoken to each other – or touched each other – quite like that ever since. She feels almost guilty about how much she enjoys those memories.

But, she wonders, is it really wrong to want to feel that again? Or, perhaps, to want just a little bit more? She’s been alone for so long. So very, very long.

“So? Are you… y’know, _interested_?” Iru asks. Despite the loaded question, her expression is still calmly interested.

“…That’s classified information.”

Iru chuckles. “Ha ha. Don’t worry. It’s just between us. Who knows what two friends on a boat trip talk about, right?”

“Mm.”

“I don’t think anybody has a problem with it, so long as you treat her right. Does she still flirt with you?”

“From time to time.” Suguri chews her thumbnail.

“You ever tried flirting back?”

For a moment, she doesn’t bother to respond. But something in Iru’s deep, calm voice draws her out. “I…invited her out to a restaurant, recently. As a… I guess it was a date. I think I meant it as a date.”

“How’d it go?”

“Terrible,” Suguri replies flatly, and her brow furrows at the memory. “We got to the restaurant and it was on fire. We ended up playing disaster relief. Hime kept joking that she wished she’d bought some marshmallows to roast… She was doing that thing where she’s disappointed, but she doesn’t want to say because you’re having a bad time too.”

“Ouch,” Iru says, wincing in sympathy. “Was it a nice place?”

“Black tie, candlelit dinner. That kind of place.”

“Dang. She’d probably have loved it. But I’m sure she appreciated the attempt, right? Maybe try again, with a restaurant that’s not on fire. And, uh… Y’know. I kinda meant it when I asked if you’d tried flirting back. If you don’t let her know you’re interested from time to time, she won’t make any moves either. Give and take, right?”

Suguri sighs. It’s good advice, but harder to put into practice. ‘Give and take’ isn’t quite right for what she’s feeling, but it’s close enough to work with for the moment. “Alright. Sorry, but I think I’m done talking about this now.” She pauses. “Don’t tell anybody about this.”

“What happens on the boat, stays on the boat. Scout’s honour,” Iru says, picking her rod back up. “Say, you wouldn’t have any advice for this fishing thing, would ya? I don’t wanna come all the way out and not catch anything.”

Suguri says nothing, and when Iru turns to look she has already launched herself from the gunwales and disappeared into the glassy water with barely a splash. Iru counts out the seconds, one, two, three, before Suguri’s head breaks the surface on the other side of the boat. In her hands is a very confused cod, wriggling for dear life. After she’s sure Iru has seen it, she tosses it back into the water and climbs back into the boat, shaking her wet hair like a dog.

“The trick is not to bother with the rod.”

“I guess. Isn’t it… uh… kinda cold?”

“Yes. If we’re done fishing, let’s go for hot chocolate. You can write it off as an expense.”

Iru chuckles. “Oh, I can, can I?”

“Applied creatively, accountancy is a very powerful force,” Suguri replies, sagely. As Iru swings the boat around, Suguri finds her mind wandering to Hime – and what to buy her for a souvenir.


	22. Fever

Nath groans and twists beneath the sheets, her hair plastered to her forehead, her breath rising in thick, heavy clouds. The air is cold but her skin is hot, fever-blushed. Damp with sweat.

It has been years since she has been sick. As an altered human, she thought she never would be. She also thought she would never again know the pain of a hangover, but she had swiftly discovered the lie in the days following the war.

The war, the war, the war. So tired of the war.

To be entirely fair, they gave her an immune system that was bulletproof. But they couldn’t give her one that was future proof. A handful of times in every few hundred years, something entirely new would pop up that her body didn’t know how to deal with, and she would be reduced to bed rest while it figured it out. Never, she has noticed, at a convenient time.

At least she still has the strength to grumble.

An iron bar of sunlight is falling through a gap in the curtains to strike her aching head, and she wishes dearly to get up and deal with it. But her balance has been off since the morning. She feels clumsy, inert. As if she were made of clay. Clay that is constantly thudding with some dull pain, hidden under the surface.

She glances sidelong at an alarm clock next to the bed. It was a find in a bazaar. Somebody’s heirloom, they said, a real old-fashioned seven segment numerical LED display. Tech speak for ‘big red numbers on a black background’. Probably fake, not older than two years, tops. Part of the retro technology craze. Her mind muddles its way through the useless background knowledge before eventually centering on the one thing that matters: Sora will be here in half an hour for their sleepover. Half an hour is the blink of an eye, the sound of a thought.

“Never convenient,” she mutters into her pillow.

She needs to get up. She needs to haul her legs over the side of the bed, wobble to her feet, and hit the shower so she isn’t sweaty and disgusting. She needs to struggle into some clothes so she doesn’t have to answer the door wearing a vest top and nothing below the waist. She needs to go out and shop for snacks, think about what to do for entertainment, tidy the apartment. She doesn’t do any of these things. What she does is catch the sun in her eye and blink, and then blink again, only the second blink lasts longer than the first, and then the third blink is like the curtain falling down at the cinema, and her eyelids feel too heavy to blink again after that.

And in her dreams the colours bleed together, and there is a roar that she hears in her bones but never with her ears, and she has arms again but the skin is not hers and the hands are not hers and in the back of the hand she sees with such clarity the raised tendons like bird’s feet on her knuckles, and she feels fragile in a way that she has not for years upon years upon years.

And when she looks down her legs are melting, like plasticine beneath a hair dryer, and at once she realised that a bargain has been struck, these arms for her legs, and she tries to cry out, to tell them no, that she’s lived this way for millennia and she can’t unlearn it all, anything but her legs, but when she speaks her voice is the grinding of her own teeth, endlessly and forever.

She feels something cold and wet drip down from her forehead and suddenly she is awake, gasping, thrashing, trying to sit up but there is some great force pushing her head down into her pillow, more irresistible than gravity, needlepoints of pressure that must be fingertips but she was sure the door was locked, she was sure –

“Nath. It’s me, okay? Calm down.”

The voice is Sora’s, and the realisation crashes into her like a tidal wave. She is safe. Sora is here. Even at the fever pitch of the war, Sora never wanted to hurt her. The world slowly begins to make sense again. She breathes deeply, raggedly, feels her pulse begin to slow. She wiggles her toes and finds, to her great relief, that they are all present and accounted for. A little cold, but very reassuringly there and unmelted. Another droplet of water comes from the cold compress Sora is holding to her forehead and trickles down her face.

“Sora? What… what time is it?” she asks. Her voice has a rasp to it that wasn’t there yesterday.

“Just past seven.”

Seven? Sora was supposed to come at six. She groans, long and loud. Tonight was meant to be a fun sleepover, but here she is, having woken up an hour late, drenched in sweat, with no food in the house and still – she realises, with no small amount of discomfort – half-naked beneath the sheets. Needless to say, it’s not how she would want to greet a guest, never mind a friend.

“You didn’t answer when I knocked, so I flew around to the balcony. You were tossing and turning,” Sora says. Her voice is wistful, and a little distant; she still holds the compress in place, although more gently. “I didn’t know you could get sick.”

Nath chuckles, although only to herself. More would probably damage her throat, which feels swollen and itchy. “We weren’t all built with specs like yours.”

Sora crinkles her nose – ‘built’ is something of a dirty word. Suguri always says she was raised to be the planet’s protector, and that her power was a gift from her father; Hime always skirts around the issue of how she came to be. But the only thing that ever got ‘built’ in the war time were walls, and weapons.

“Have you eaten?” she asks.

Nath looks to the side, which is a firm a ‘no’ as any. Long experience teaches her to expect a scolding, although she isn’t sure what a scolding from Sora would sound like. Probably a fate best avoided. Her punishment, however, doesn’t come. Instead, Sora takes a scrunchie from the pocket of her dress and ties back her shaggy hair.

“Okay. I’ll make you a sandwich. Stay in bed and I’ll bring it in. Yell if you feel bad.”

“Sora, wait.”

“Mm?”

“Sorry. For getting sick. I didn’t mean to,” Nath says, and immediately feels silly when she hears the words out loud. Of course she didn’t mean to. “Can I… ask you to feed the cat, too? He usually hangs around the fences outside. There’s food on the counter.”

“Roger.”

With that, she bustles purposefully out of the room, and Nath is alone once more. She’s almost surprised to see Sora being so practical, although she knows she shouldn’t be. Deep down, she, Suguri, Hime, and even herself are very practical people. They’ve had to be.

“ _Tooooriyaaaaaah!!!”_

Somewhere in the kitchen, she hears a chef’s knife crash down heavily on the chopping board. Not _that_ practical, evidently. She leans back, settles into her pillow and allows herself to wonder if Sora is making a sandwich or murdering one. Eventually the sound of chopping becomes gentler and more uniform. Rhythmic, somehow cathartic. Her eyelids begin to droop again. She is carried away by the tide of sleep.

She doesn’t doze long enough to dream. She’s woken up by something flumping onto the bed near her feet, and opens her eyes to a face full of cat, all whiskers and deep green eyes and heavy purrs. When she turns her head to the side, she finds another pair of green eyes staring at her – Sora is sitting at her bedside, cross-legged, on a cushion. There’s a plate of turkey sandwiches on the bedside table – a little ragged looking at the edges, but probably tasty nonetheless.

“I fed him, and then he followed me all the way back up to the apartment. I think he knew you were sick and wanted to cheer you up,” the girl says.

“Come on, now. He’s a cat, and a stray at that. He didn’t know I was sick. He was just trying to get more food out of you,” she replies. “Look, he’s trying to eat the sandwiches.”

“No! Bad Roger. You can have one sandwich, but that’s it,” Sora says sternly, wagging a finger at the cat. The cat reaches out to bat it with a paw, and soon there is a paw-finger duel going on.

“Roger? I thought you were calling him Major.”

“I thought he was a Major, but he looks more like a Roger today.”

“He doesn’t look like either. He looks like a cat.”

“Fine. Give him a name and then we’ll call him that.”

“He’s not even my cat, though.”

“He’s in your house, and you feed him.”

“No, _you_ fed him and _you_ let him into the house!”

The cat, content with the ritual offering of a single turkey sandwich, ignores the noise, gives Nath’s eyebrows a cursory lick, and strolls down the length of the bed to curl up on her feet. Before she can do anything about it, he has used the ancient cat art of becoming an unbudgeable ball of fur five times his regular weight, the better to avoid being picked up and moved. Meanwhile, Sora cuts off a corner of sandwich, spears it with a cocktail stick and thrusts it insistently in the direction of Nath’s mouth.

“Alright, alright, I’m eating,” she groans. “Mmpfpf.”

“Good. When you’ve eaten the whole thing, you can go back to sleep,” Sora says, spearing another chunk of sandwich. “That’s what sleepover are for, right?”

Nath has to nudge the sandwich away with her chin before she can speak. “Well… traditionally, not a lot of sleeping goes on at sleepovers. Usually, you’d spend all night talking, playing games, eating sugary snacks, telling spooky stories…” Although what stories would satisfactorily bespook a centuries-old super soldier, Nath couldn’t guess.

“That’s ridiculous. It has sleep in the name. Why would they call it a sleepover if you spend all of it awake?” Sora asks, critically. “Are you feeling better?”

She rolls her shoulders and mulls over the question. It’s true that, for a moment, she almost forgot she was sick. But the sickness is still there, scurrying inside her in a futile attempt to stop her altered immune system ripping it to shreds. It feels, despite the cold compress, that all the heat in her body is being sucked into her forehead, leaving nothing but empty cold and goosepimples in its wake.

She decides that, with Sora, honesty is probably the best policy. Honesty leavened with understatement. “I’m a little chilly.”

The blonde girl nods slowly. “Okay. Budge up.”

“Huh?”

“Budge up. I’m warm, so I’ll lie next to you.”

There are moments in life when you become suddenly, starkly aware that horrible, horrible consequences are coming your way, and it is utterly up to you to avoid or divert them. It isn’t easy to change the course of fate while your body is filled with tiny microbial invaders, but Nath quietly resolves to do her best.

“Sora, I appreciate the thought, but you can’t.” It sounds very nice. Very diplomatic. Not a screaming, ‘you are disgusting and I don’t want you to have direct body contact with me’ refusal, but still quite firm. Solid, one might say. Unfortunately, Sora has a pretty solid head.

“Why not? I won’t get sick.”

Nath reminds herself, clinging to the fact like a sailor to a shipwreck: With Sora, honesty is the best policy. Leavened by understatement, of course. “It isn’t that, Sora. It’s just that… well, I’m not dressed.”

Sora tilts her head to the side, then nods. “Oh. It’s fine if you’re in your pyjamas. I won’t judge. We walk around in our pyjamas all the time. You can even go to the supermarket in your pyjamas nowadays. The world is a really crazy place.”

_Okay_ , Nath thinks. Perhaps a touch _less_ understatement. “Ah… I mean I’m _really_ not dressed.”

Sora looks at her with a strange, blank expression – like an animal seeing a television for the first time, and wondering what to make of it. Then, very quietly, a little “oh” escapes from her lips. “No underwear?”

For a moment, Nath finds her gaze rooted to a particularly interesting whorl in the cat’s fur.

“That’s pretty daring.”

Nath feels some of the heat collected in her forehead kindly relocate itself to her cheeks. “How is it daring? I’m a grown woman, living alone in my own house, and I have blown up _tanks_ by myself. I can wear as much or as little as I want when I sleep!”

There is a slight twist to Sora’s smile, and it looks like it would be right at home on Hime’s face instead of hers. “It explains why you’re cold. Budge up. I’ll lie on top of the duvet and you can stay below it.”

For a moment, she thinks about protesting. There are still things that she can leverage to prevent this. For one, moving her will disturb the cat. For two, you shouldn’t move a sick person. Before she can count the third reason, Sora has already given her a hard shove and is arranging herself in the newly made space so she can stare at Nath nose-to-nose.

The real problem with not having hands, Nath realises, is that you can’t hide your face in them when you’re embarrassed.

“Nath?”

Sora’s voice is very, very close. As is her mouth. And her eyes. And most of the rest of her, come to think of it. There are a lot of thoughts and emotions going through Nath’s mind, most of them probably not suitable for somebody undertaking bedrest, and the most she can do is make an answering grunt.

“You’re sweaty.”

“Don’t say that!” she snaps. Well, perhaps she’s not snapping. Perhaps it’s a little too high pitched to be a snap. Perhaps it, technically, if you were really into specifics, qualified as a wail. Just a small one, though. A teensy, tiny, hint of a wail that nobody would ever notice if their face wasn’t a hand’s width from her own. Which Sora’s was, still.

“Hmhm. You’re usually very calm and reliable. It’s funny to see you pout,” Sora chuckles.

“I am _not_ pouting,” Nath sniffs.

“Nu-uh. That was a pout. I’m an expert pout spotter, since Hime does it all the time.”

Nath sighs deeply, which the cat takes as an opportunity to relocate in the gap between their bodies after having been so rudely knocked off Nath’s feet. “Very funny. Be careful, though. If you tease me too much, I’ll smack you.”

“But then you’d have to get up. And you can’t, because you’re naked, and because I’ll get mad if you move around too much when you’re sick.” There is a certain smugness in the girl’s expression, not unlike the cat’s.

“Supposing,” Nath says, defiantly squaring her chin, “you annoyed me enough that I just did it anyway?”

The blonde takes a moment to think about the possibility. “Then you should buy me dinner first.”

“All these risqué jokes… I think Hime has been teaching you the wrong things,” Nath says, and this time she’s _definitely_ pouting.

“Rude. I’m an adult too. Even if I don’t act like it,” Sora replies, and reaches across to boop Nath’s nose with her fingertip. “Okay. I’ll stop teasing you. But you have to go to sleep and get well soon.”

She sighs, and accepts the compromise. “Roger.”

“Roger is the cat’s name.”

“Roger is _not_ the cat’s name!”

“Then what is his name?”

“Kaze or something, I don’t know! I’m going to sleep.”

She rolls over to face the wall, but sleep is slow in coming. If she’s honest, she feels stronger and more energetic than she has all day. _Never convenient_ , she thinks. She is almost, but not quite, surprised when Sora pulls her into a soothing, drowsy hug.

She wakes up the next morning with a face full of cat, and Sora’s arms still around her shoulders.


	23. Suguri(a)'s Secret

Nath was many things – tall, deadly, owner of a pair of beautiful fuzzy eyebrows that were the envy of her friends and which struck terror into the heart of evil. But on that particular winter day, the thing she was most of all was ‘unimpressed’. Suguri, who she liked and respected for being the only one in her household with a train of logic even distantly connected to reality, had woken her up that morning with a phone call. It was a very exciting phone call. It had sentences like ‘come quickly’, ‘I need your help’, ‘bring Sora’, and ‘don’t tell Hime. I don’t want to drag her into this’.

All of the above rather suggested to Nath that there was justice to be dispensed, guns to be gattled and explosions to walk slowly away from and refuse to look at. Even Sora was excited. (Sora, Nath found out on the flight over, had spent the morning watching professional wrestling with Hime. Hime appreciated it for the subtle choreography and athleticism underlying each movement. Sora appreciated it because the wrestlers got sweaty, grappled a lot, and then somebody’s spine broke at the end.)

Sadly, it seemed that the most dangerous enemy they had to fight was gravity, which was like fighting a feeble toddler with a bad attention span. The location Suguri gave them was, alas, not a back-alley in a gothic city populated by ne’er-do-wells and forgotten dreams; it was not an industrial complex filled to the brim with gun-toting goons who had sold their souls to their corporate masters for a shilling and an extra sachet of sugar in the office canteen; it was not even a fast-food restaurant, which Nath considered a less immediate kind of evil but all the worse for their insidiousness.

They touched down in a small town shopping centre, the kind where there were at least five shops whose name included ‘Ye olde’ and where every shopkeeper would be glad to sit down and chat with you about how their grandparents made a living fashioning hats out of old fence posts or something like that. There were hanging baskets of hellebores, their wide-open petals blooming in cream and pink and even black. Upon the wall of the central shopping hall was a huge clock, the hands of which still had a light dusting of early-morning frost. They found Suguri sitting on a bench, huddled over a cup of hot chocolate that had a towering mountain of whipped cream applied to the top, some of which Suguri had accidentally applied to her face.

“Thank you for coming so quickly,” she said, running her tongue along her upper lip.

“It’s fine. We’re here to help… uh… do something,” Sora began. “Oh, I know! You must need help drinking your hot chocolate.”

Nath couldn’t suppress a smirk, but reset her face to a neutral frown in short order. “That’s highly optimistic. What are we actually here for? I was expected there to be more fire and explosions, but it seems perfectly peaceful.”

The silver-haired girl hesitated, almost hiding her face behind her cup. “I need fashion advice.”

A number of different emotions flickered across Nath’s face. She had gotten up early to be here. She’d put on her prosthetics arms, one of which had been hastily patched up by the techs only a couple of days ago. She’d even thought of a cover story for Hime – she and Sora were meant to be exploring the world of trains right now. It was, in short, a lot of bother to go through for a shopping trip. But she still believed, for better or for worse, that Suguri was a reasonable person, and resolved to be diplomatic about it.

“I’m not going to agree or disagree with that statement… What are you shopping for? A dress? Jewellery?”

This time, Suguri was definitely hiding her face behind her cup. “I… want to buy some cute underwear.”

This was not something that Nath had an answer for. Luckily, Sora could be counted on to jump in and steer the conversation in a good direction. Nath had faith in her, right up until the moment that she tilted her head.

“I thought your shipment came in a month ago?”

“Shipment?

“Yes. Underwear usually only lasts a few years before it starts getting worn out. When I turned 500

I got tired of replacing it all the time, so now I just buy a whole bunch in one go. It saves a lot of time. I recommend it.”

Sora nodded. “I was surprised. I pried open the crate with a crowbar and there were just hundreds of identical boxer shorts and sports bras. I thought it would be a dishwasher. I’d like a dishwasher. And some hot chocolate.”

Nath rolled her eyes. Boxer shorts and sports bras. What a bizarrely illuminating order. She wondered if Suguri took the same approach to all her clothes – just rack after rack of identical jackets and skirts, all nicely pressed and ready to wear until they got bullet-holes in them.

“But that’s _everyday_ underwear. I need cute ones. Help me pick.”

“Are we really the right people to ask for this…? I know you said not to bring Hime, but it seems like she’d give you much better advice. Why not ask her about it?” Nath asked, arching an eyebrow.

Suguri fidgeted. “That’s classified,” she said, and those two words said as much as a full length dissertation. “You two are my only hope.”

Which, in Nath’s opinion, meant she was hopeless. But she was still in diplomacy mode, and now began to task of trying to diplomatically extricate herself from the situation. “I don’t know. It’s a little strange.”

Sora looked up at her balefully, as if sensing her attempts to escape. “It’s not strange. We’re three friends shopping for clothes together. That isn’t strange at all.”

Nath frowned. “Yes, but if we’re going to be working together, we’ll have to trade bra sizes and measurements and such. That doesn’t strike you as being too much?”

“That’s fine. I trust you and Suguri, and it makes it easier for you to buy me presents.”

“Please, Nath. I need your life experience,” Suguri asked, and suddenly the front against Nath was united.

“I’m… not an expert on underwear,” Nath said, looking away.

“That’s because you don’t – mfpffpf.”

Nath had never quite appreciated the convenience of hands as much as she did when she jammed hers over Sora’s mouth. “Shush,” she said, and turned her head back to Suguri. “Sorry. I just don’t know if I’d even be helpful.”

“You can be moral support. Please.”

“Mpfpf.”

Suguri’s wide, red eyes suddenly had a very puppy-dog like quality to them. Sora’s lower lip had developed a devastating tremble. Nath’s temples were already beginning to throb. She massaged them with artificial fingertips, and felt her will to resist rolling away. “Ugh. Why, out of all the 10,000 year old women that I know, am I the only one who acts like an adult? Fine, I’ll go lingerie shopping with you. But don’t expect me to be much help.”

It was a victory, or close enough. Sora gave Suguri a celebratory high-five, and the two immediately started discussing their plan of attack.

“We should all go in together,” Suguri began.

“Un. No woman left behind,” Sora agreed.

“If Nath isn’t good with underwear, than means you’re our expert, Sora. You can be point guard. I’ll be in the middle, and Nath can defend our rear.”

“ _Please_ don’t say I’m defending your rear right after talking about underwear.”

“Why not?”

“It’s strange!”

“It’s not strange. I trust you to watch my back. So I also trust you to watch my backside,” Sora said sagely, with her open, innocent eyes. Nath wasn’t fooled.

“You’re doing this on purpose,” she accused.

“Maybe.”

Little did Nath know, bickering was a very efficient method of transportation, and by the time she was done proving empirically that she had never deliberately looked at Sora’s hindquarters, they had reached the store Suguri picked out for the mission. It had wide, clear windows, a revolving door that had no doubt claimed dozens of unwary consumers, and mannequins with no heads and no limbs set out to display the merchandise. Nath looked at them and suppressed an involuntary shudder.

“I know what it’s like to be armless, but I wouldn’t like to be headless,” she muttered to herself.

“They take the heads off so they don’t blush when everybody sees them in their underwear,” Sora said authoritatively. She was rather enjoying being an expert for the day, and had already furnished the party with several helpful facts, all of which were wrong but which she said with such earnestness that Nath couldn’t bring herself to contradict them. “Okay. The first thing we should do is find the petite section.”

“I’m not petite,” Suguri grumbled. “I’m _aerodynamic_. It’s a feature.”

Regardless of anybody’s feelings on size nomenclature, finding the petite section was easier said than done. The doors of the store opened up to an expansive world of silk, ribbon and lace, dotted with the occasional shop assistant who had become lost in the maze of stands and mannequins. Sora marched towards the nearest one like a shark approaching a stricken life-raft.

“Excuse me. Do you have anything in ablative high-stretch nanofibre?”

The shop assistant shook their head.

“What about tensile titanium weaves?”

A second shake of the head.

“Not even heat-resistant polycarbonate mantling?”

She received the magic third headshake, and marched back to Suguri and Nath with crossed arms and a scowl.

“I knew technology had gone backwards since my time. But I didn’t think fashion had, too,” she complained.

“Let’s narrow down what we’re looking for,” Nath said. As much as she promised that she would be no help, _somebody_ needed to help move everything in the right direction. The sooner begun, the sooner done – and there was something about being surrounded by rack after intimidating rack of ladies’ undergarments that did wonders for her work ethic. “Suguri, what kind of colours do you like?”

Suguri thought about it for a moment. “Grey.”

“...and?”

“Grey.”

Nath knit her eyebrows. This was going to be harder work than she had anticipated. “Okay. Well, what do you want out of it? Do you want it to be cute? Sexy? Practical?”

“All.”

“What kind of fabric do you want it to be make out of?”

“The good kind.”

“Alright. That should be easy enough to look for. Nath, you take south. I’ll take east, and Suguri can take north,” Sora said.

Nath mouthed a silent apology for what she was about to do, but the time was upon her. If she wanted to get out of the shop, she would have to apply the three values she cared most about: truth, justice, and social engineering. “Actually, Sora, can you do me a favour and go ask at the counter if they sell body paint?”

“Roger,” Sora said, and was gone in a rush of golden hair and good intentions. Suguri looked at her go, utterly aghast, and was about to set off in pursuit when Nath put a hand on her shoulder.

“I’m not going to paint on my underwear!” she hissed.

“Of course not,” Nath said. It was time to give the silver haired girl a little bit of a push. “The idea is that you give it to Hime and ask her to paint some for you.”

All the colour drained out of Suguri’s face to make way for the flood of red headed towards her cheeks. She struggled for words, but the only sound available to her was a quiet, high pitched wail – like air escaping from an old fashioned kettle. Eventually rediscovered her tongue. “T-that’s…”

Nath couldn’t stop her mouth from narrowing into a smirk. “You imagined it, didn’t you?”

“Absolutely not,” Suguri said. To her very great credit, she had brought her voice back into non-supersonic frequencies, but any attempts at dignity were ruined by her shaking her head so fiercely that her hair flew around her like a lion’s mane.

“Well, that confirms that you’re doing this to impress Hime. Look,” Nath said, dropping her voice to what she hoped was a low, conciliatory tone. “I don’t know underwear. But to save us from wandering around this shop all day, I have some advice.”

Suguri said nothing, because all previous attempts at conversation had dug her a grave from which even she couldn’t fly out of. But with a short motion of the head, she indicated that she was listening.

“Don’t worry about getting any specific style, or colour. Don’t even worry about what Hime’s tastes are like. Just get something that makes you feel confident. Something fun to wear. Nice clothes are all fine and good by themselves, but really they’re about highlighting and bringing out the best qualities of the person wearing them. Lingerie is probably the same way.”

Suguri mused on that for a second. “I see. It’s like the clothes are the side dish, but I’m the main meal.”

“Uh… something like that. And if you _really_ want to give that girl a treat, bring her along next time and ask her to pick something out for you.”

Suguri thrust her hands in her pocket and knit her brows together. “But then it won’t be a surprise… and she’ll probably pick something scandalous to tease me.”

Nath grinned; she couldn’t exactly disagree with that assessment. “Wear it anyway. It’ll show how much you value her input, and she’ll have fun picking out something for you to wear and imagining you in lots of different things.”

“I see,” Suguri replied. The frown that had caught her lips was disappearing now, ebbing quietly out of existence. “I knew it was a good idea to bring you.”

“Hold that thought,” Nath said as Sora fought her way through the racks to reach them. “What’s the verdict?”

“The only colour they have is laurel green, like on army fatigues,” the blonde girl replied. “You can’t even paint yourself as a dinosaur. Nath, you’d be a great dinosaur.”

“Go and ask if they stock anything edible.”

“Roger.”

Suguri didn’t say anything as Sora picked her way back through the lingerie forest, because her face already said it all. Nath put a friendly hand on her shoulder. “You said it yourself, right? It’s like the clothes are the side dish, but you’re the main meal.”

“I’m going to look for something by myself. Don’t follow me,” she replied; her voice was cold. But she was starting to look at the racks in a different way, occasionally rubbing the material between thumb and forefinger; somehow, Nath knew that her work was done.

Which of course was her cue to wait at the entrance, the better to make a speedy escape. She fought the urge to whistle as she walked (for all her strength, she had never quite been able to carry a tune), as well as a tingle of guilt for teasing Suguri quite so hard. When it came to teasing, she reminded herself, what goes around comes around – and since Sora had been teasing _her_ all morning, somebody else had it coming.

It was not until she felt Sora’s hand grab her own that she realised that the wheel can turn quickly indeed.

“They’re sold out of edible clothes,” Sora informed her, which by itself was enough to make her silently give thanks to the whims of fortune. “But I found something nice on the way back.”

She was holding a matching set of bra and panties cut with fabric the colour of seashells; the panties had a low, sweeping hem to hug the edges of the hips, and some parts – in fact, most of the parts – were made of fabric so sheer you could see through it. The bra had a deep plunge and was accented with lines of rose gold at the cups, which were also distressingly translucent.

The main thing that worried Nath, though, was that the set was far too big for Sora – but not too big for her.

“You cannot be serious,” she moaned.

“Why? We came all the way here. I think these would look good on you,” Sora said, and gave Nath’s arm a gentle tug. “Come and try them on.”

Sora, unlike Suguri, was not a reasonable person. She was brave, and gentle, and quite arguably beautiful, but not reasonable. She couldn’t be bargained with. She couldn’t be intimidated. She couldn’t be teased into submission. The world could count itself lucky for that, because a reasonable person would not have fought against both sides of the world’s biggest war with no plan and no backup. But it did mean that when she had an objective, she was truly relentless in her determination to achieve it.

So Nath did not struggle as she was led by the hand toward the changing rooms, because she knew that Sora’s current objective was for her clothes to come off and the underwear to go on, and she rather preferred to retain as much control over the whole process as was possible. Instead, she set about milking the situation for all the advantage that could be had.

“This is a one-time thing, do you understand?” she asked. Perhaps if she were not normally deficient in fingers she would jab one at the air to embellish her point; alas, the habit had not been formed, and her artificial hands remained stoically at her sides. “I’m only doing it because it’s you.”

“Thanks. You have to come out and show me how it looks, though,” Sora said peacefully as she watched the assistant hunt down a slightly tattier store copy of the set and spray it liberally with disinfectant. “No hiding.”

“You didn’t say that before,” Nath replied. She had been hoping she’d get away with a quick change and then a ‘looks good, but not my thing’. Apparently, no such luck.

“I said it just now. Go on. I’ll be here if you have problems.”

And thus was Nath banished to the changing rooms. She had no problems with the changing rooms. Each cubicle was the size of a small closet, with a full-length mirror affixed to the back wall, but she had slept in closets before. If there had been an option for room service, she might just have lived out the rest of her life there. It might be preferable to venturing back outside to wade through a tide of embarrassment. Sadly, a world with no wine and no legroom was too high a price to pay for pride, so there was nothing to be done but get on with things. The sooner begun, the sooner done.

She shed her clothes quickly and unceremoniously. In some ways it was easier to dress and undress with arms, but she was so used to doing it without that sometimes she just felt like the prosthetics were getting in the way. Before long she stood in nothing but her own skin, bronzed by years of adventure and dotted with scars. She frowned at her own reflection in the mirror, at her stocky thighs and broad shoulders; she had been taught as a girl that tall women were meant to be willowy and graceful, and it had been hard to stop believing it and embrace her own shape. Sometimes, just for a moment, she would imagine herself in flowing clothes and with a soft, narrow silhouette… but just for a moment.

She was halfway through putting on the set (and secretly quite pleased with how the pale colours set off her skin) before she hit what would go down in history as ‘The Snag’.

“Sora,” she hissed, peeking her face out of the changing room. Sora blinked at her peacefully. The shop provided a bench for people to sit down on while their companions tried on the wares, and Sora was currently draped across it like a well-beaten rug. “I can’t do the… the thing.”

Silent confusion flashed through Sora’s eyes, and she begrudging dragged herself into what could be generously described as a sitting position. “What thing?”

“The hook. It’s got a hook at the back and I can’t quite get it.”

“It’s okay. You just get it in your fingers and–”

“I don’t normally _have_ fingers. Listen, I’m changing back.”

“Hold on,” Sora said, and the expression on her face was one of ominous peace. “I’ll help.”

Nath had just enough time to face the other way and clutch the cups of the bra to her breasts before Sora slipped soundlessly beyond the curtain. She suddenly became very acutely aware of two things: how little space there was to share between two people, and how easy it would be for Sora to look over her shoulder at the full-length mirror in front of her.

“I didn’t say you could come in!”

“Hime says it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission. Besides, I’m helping.”

Nath was about to deliver a long and passionately argued lecture on the fact that that idiom did not apply in any situation even remotely connected with sexuality, but was cut short by Sora’s fingers grazing the blades of her shoulders. Despite herself, she gasped; despite how lightly Sora had touched her, it felt like there was electricity flowing through where her fingertips had been.

“You have a lot of scars,” Sora said, and her fingers trickled down Nath’s spine to rest on a scar at her waist. “This one… I think this one is mine. Ah! I’m sorry. Did it hurt?” Nath had jerked when she touched her, a brief, involuntary movement. Goosebumps were already collecting under her fingertips.

Nath gulped. “It didn’t hurt. I was just… surprised. And embarrassed.” The warmth that had been settled in her cheeks was beginning to spread through the rest of her body, and her skin suddenly felt very sensitive to the coolness of the air, and the warmth Sora radiated in the confined space. She closed her eyes and resolved to keep them that way, only to have them spring open as Sora idly stroked the scar.

“Why? There’s no need to be embarrassed.” Sora’s fingers began to move back to the task, tiny flashes of sensation on her back – fiddling, fitting, adjusting. She felt the fabric at her breasts grow taut and secure as the hook found its purchase. Sora’s big green eyes flicked from her back to the mirror and rested there, unapologetic.

“Don’t stare… It’s strange if you stare.” She folded her arms across her breasts, which felt heavy and tight.

“It’s not strange,” Sora said, and her voice had such dreamlike certainty again, like the day when she had hugged her and declared that they should be friends. “I like how you look. So, I’m looking at you. Put your arms down?”

The shift in tone was so slight, but so important; it wasn’t a childish demand, but a request. Slowly, almost without her thinking about it, her arms fell.

“They really suit you. They’re… I forget the word. Exotic, but innocent at the same time.” A pause, perhaps for breath. “Do you like them?”

She looked at herself in the mirror, then, at the scars and the blemishes, the muscle and the skin. At the way her clothes emphasised the swell of her breasts and the soft curve of her hips. At the way that Sora was looking at her with deep, piercing eyes through the proxy of a mirror. She would never be willowy, or small, or cute. But she felt more than ever like a woman.

“I like them,” she said, finally, and watched Sora’s reflection break out into a soft, contented smile.

“…Actually, I have some of my allowance left over. If I get these for you, will you wear them?”

“I think I would, yes. They’re fiddly, so maybe not all the time. But sometimes.” She paused, and even though her fingers were strange and alien to her, she still curled her hands into little balls. “But you don’t have to do that, Sora.”

“I want to. Because you’re my friend.”

Again Sora’s hands fell to her waist, and pulled her back into a soft hug. Her skin tingled at the places where Sora’s hands fell. “You’re my friend, but you didn’t have to be. I shot you and I scarred you, but you’re still my friend. And you still bring me out on days like this to have fun. I wanted to say thank you.”

“It’s fine.” Nath said, and put her own artificial hand over Sora’s. “I’m grateful to you, too. Life is less boring with you around.”

They stayed like that a few minutes longer, not speaking. Then, reluctantly, Nath pulled herself out of the embrace.

“I should change back. Suguri will be wondering where we are.” A long pause.

“Oh. Oh! Sorry. I wasn’t going to watch,” Sora said, the thought finally clicking in her brain. Quietly, she disappeared through the curtains again, probably to wander off and find Suguri.

Nath took one last look in the mirror, and sighed. Hopefully bras were easier to take off than they were to put on.

* * *

 

For Hime, it had been a slipper day.

Actually, Hime had four different pairs of slippers, all for different purposes, because she believed them to be a superior footwear choice for somebody who never had to set foot on the ground if she didn’t want to. But slipper days were all about the pink, fuzzy, enticingly soft bunny slippers that Suguri had bought for her as a joke and which had backfired horrifically. Yes, they were tasteless. Yes, if she ventured outside the house in them she was liable to find herself in the loving hands of the fashion police. But the fact remained that some days, you didn’t want to dress up. You wanted to lounge on the loveseat and watch one muscular human smash another muscular human through a table. Multiple tables, if it had been a bad week.

She was still lounging when she heard the key in the front door, and she knew immediately that it was Suguri’s. The front door might have been her one true rival for Suguri’s attentions, so long had the silver-haired girl known it; she spent a quiet hour every fortnight easing a layer of oil around the hinges and checking for signs of mould or rot. It _must_ have been replaced at some point, Hime thought, since after ten thousand years even the most well-kept of doors would have rotted away to nothing, but Suguri maintained that their portal was quite permanent, and always had been.

The truth of the matter remained a mystery, but the take-home message (so to speak) was that Suguri could open the door as quickly and quietly as a jaguar stalking through a rainforest. Sora, on the other hand, was usually a mess of keys and some small amount of shoulder barging. Hime was ashamed to admit that she had also been forced to rely on percussive persuasion to get into the house at times, but she kept it to a minimum.

“Welcome home,” Hime called, hovering to her feet and padding out to the entryway. Suguri being home meant that there was hugging to be done, a duty that Hime always discharged with a smile. The silver haired girl had a greater repertoire of hugs than she had facial expressions, one for every occasion and probably a few secret hugs for occasions that hadn’t been invented yet. There was the soft, dopey ‘good morning’ hug, the quick but emotional ‘thank you’ hug, the lift-your-feet-off-the-ground ‘nice to see you’ hug. Not to mention the slow and sensual ‘I missed you’ hug that they had enjoyed only recently.

Today’s hug was quick, a little jittery, and hampered by the bag dangling from Suguri’s arm. An excited hug. The ‘I have news’ hug. Between the bag and the behaviour, Hime foresaw a present in her immediate future… but it could wait. Although she did love presents, they had slowly descended her list of priorities as time went by.

“How was your day? I wondered where you were going so early in the morning. Do you need anything to eat?” she asked.

“No. Well, yes. Maybe later. I went shopping,” Suguri said, kicking off her boots. She did not, Hime noticed, put down the bag. “I want to show you something.”

In Hime’s view, there were few things she could be shown that were worth going hungry over, but her friend’s mouth was creased into a determined little frown, and she knew better than try and slow her down with pleasant morsels and small talk. Sometimes, Suguri just needed to go _fast._

“Please close your eyes and wait in the living room. I’ll be down in a moment,” Suguri said as she ascended the stairs, thump-thump-thump-thump-thump. She turned at the top to look at Hime with baleful eyes. “No peeking.”

No peeking! Now there was an instruction that made Hime’s heart race. Not only was this mystery thing important enough to postpone brunch, but it was worthy of peeking at. And peeking was well within her power. She could fly up the stairs so Suguri would never hear her footsteps, gently ease open the bedroom door and… oh, the temptation was there, and it was delicious. Perhaps intentionally so. But there was a certain decadence in waiting for Suguri to come to her and in letting the anticipation build, so she trotted back over to the loveseat and put her hands demurely over her eyes.

The wait was longer than she expected; the seconds seemed to tick on forever, even as she counted them in her head. One, two, three, a minute, five minutes. An eternity, floating silently. She strained her ears, alert for the sound of footsteps, and was disappointed when none came.

The first inkling she had that her wait was over was when she heard a deep intake of breath. There was a nervous hitch in the sound, and then a long, slow exhalation. She kept her hands over her eyes, in good faith. After another two steadying breaths, she heard Suguri’s voice.

“You can look now.”

She opened her eyes to see Suguri standing in front of her, which was always a fine treat. Perhaps it was strange that she never got tired of looking at her, but anybody who thought that had never tried to derive enjoyment from looking into the blackness of space for ten thousand years.

Even better than seeing a Suguri, though, was seeing a Suguri who was wearing very little – which, in Hime’s humble opinion, was the highest state of being a Suguri could attain. It gave her the best power to weight ratio and was more aerodynamic, and wasn’t that a wonderful goal for the world’s fastest girl?

To make things sweeter, the little that Suguri was wearing was very kind to the eye – a lovely little two-piece lingerie set in a dark burgundy that flattered her pale skin and matched the red of her eyes (and also the red of her cheeks). The lace had been inlaid with a pattern of roses, and the cut – while a little conservative – was clean and flattering. Hime had to try very hard not to lick her lips – or at least not to lick them too obviously.

“What do you think?” Suguri asked, and although she had been quite deliberate about thrusting out her chest and standing confidently, her voice still had something of a timid maiden about it.

“I think you are a _treasure_ , Suguri. Did you pick those out yourself?” A solemn little nod of the head. “I’m quite impressed. They really do look marvellous on you. But what brought this on? I seem to remember that you own more pairs of underwear than any girl on the planet.”

Suguri gulped. Hime had taken a rather dim view of her bulk buying habits. “The normal stuff is fine, but I wanted something for special occasions.”

Hime sighed, but there was a smile behind the sound. “It seems like such a shame to limit it to special occasions. Why not get two or three pairs, so you could wear one whenever you wanted to feel just that little bit _extra_ on a day? Oh well. You shall always be wearing lingerie in my heart.”

“A-actually!” Suguri began sharply, spotting her opportunity. “I was… maybe thinking of going again, and… you could pick something out? For me?”

Hime pressed her hand to her lips, and when it came away she was wearing an indulgent, mischievous smile. “Oh, my. I would _love_ that. Not to say I don’t like your current ensemble, but there are a few little things I might change.” She got up, and walked over in slow, deliberate steps; Suguri stood her ground, but it was hard to avoid shrinking away. “The fit could use a little work… Something less conservative, perhaps. And with a little less padding underneath, hm?”

Suguri’s eyes flicked down to her chest and then back up to Hime’s face. When she spoke, her voice was low and furtive. “You could tell?”

“Of course I could tell. I live with you. I wake up with you. We’ve fought together, danced together, explored together. I _know_ how big your breasts are, Suguri. They are exactly perfect, and I wouldn’t give or take a single centimetre from them.”

Suguri turned away. The sentiment was heartwarming, but also possibly the most embarrassing thing that had ever happened in human history. So she didn’t see the deviousness that was creeping into Hime’s smile, although she certainly heard it in her voice. “I do have a question, though.”

Suguri’s heart – ahead of her brain by a few seconds, as usual – seemed to stop dead. “Yes?”

“I’m here, alone in the house with a beautiful woman who has very strongly insisted on showing me her lovely new lingerie. Now, one of the functions of lingerie is that it should make you want to remove it, so… Am I to take this as an _invitation_?”

Hime was teasing her. She _knew_ Hime was teasing her. She had that glint in her eye, the curve to her mouth. But it didn’t stop her heart from pounding in her chest, or her fingertips from shaking. What would Nath do in this situation…? No, not Nath. Sora, Sora never seemed embarrassed. What would she say?

“Y…you need to buy me dinner first.”

“Oh? As I recall, we went out for dinner together not too long ago,” Hime replied. She was enjoying herself too much to mention that neither of them had actually eaten anything and that the restaurant in question was on fire when they arrived. But, she thought, it was rude of her to tease so hard when Suguri was already out of her comfort zone. She put her palms up in supplication. “Oh well. I see your point. Old-fashioned girls like us should kiss before we descend to more carnal pleasures.”

“Y-yes. That’s the proper order. I agree,” Suguri said, and breathed a sigh of relief.

“I’m _so_ glad you think so,” Hime replied, and flashed her the dazzling smile of a woman who knows she has won. “In the meantime, I shall ponder what to put you in when we go shopping together. Now, if you’d like to go upstairs and put on some clothes, I’ll start on brunch. In fact, I’ll start brunch even if you stay down here and let me enjoy the view a little longer. It’s really your choice, although I expect Sora will be back from her train adventures soon.”

Actually, Sora was probably lying on her belly in Nath’s apartment, petting the cat that Nath maintained she didn’t own. The atmosphere between them had seemed happy, albeit awkward, as they exited the shop; Nath had taken Sora aside and quietly implied they should give Suguri some privacy that day, for which she was grateful.

“Okay. I’ll be right back.”

“I imagine that you’re dying to get back to your boxer shorts. I did, perhaps, go a little hard on the teasing,” Hime said, a little ruefully. It was as close to an apology as she was willing to step.

“No… I think I’ll wear these a little longer. I have to get used to them. See you in a minute.”

She bounced up the stairs and out of view, feeling giddy and excited. Hime might have gotten the best of her, but she had done it. She had gone out, bought underwear _almost_ by herself, and flirted semi-successfully (albeit clumsily). And the day was only half done! She threw on her skirt and jacket and looked at herself in the mirror, and saw a slightly different person to the Suguri who had been there this morning. Even after ten thousand years, she was still growing. Still changing. It was so exciting.

Maybe it wasn’t that hard to socialise. Maybe next time Hime teased her, she would be able to tease back. Slowly, and carefully, she pulled down the zipper of her windbreaker to show just the tiniest sliver of burgundy before going downstairs to join Hime at the table.


	24. Speaking in Tongues

The veil of winter had begun to draw in. A fine layer of frost, no thicker or darker than a sprinkling of icing sugar, had been deposited upon the rolling countryside by Nature’s great, unseen hand. It would perhaps have been a fine day for a walk; we had on a recent excursion sighted the long-footed tracks of a hare, no doubt striking its way through the year’s first snow. Regretfully I found myself still vulnerable to inclement weather at large, and snow in particular; the pale light of mid-morning found me ensconced upon Suguri’s beanbag with a duvet over my knees, slowly toiling my way through a miscellaneous volume I had plucked from Hime’s shelves. Though I would love to embellish my account with a friendly jest on her taste, my progress was sufficiently slow that I had lost all interest in stylistic considerations, and was merely busying myself with understanding the events of the book. It might have been the finest collection of drivel ever put to paper, or a genuine classic rescued from the mists of time; I had no way to be sure.

The problem, of course, was language. I was blessed in that the common tongue of the area had descended from my own, with sufficient similarity to hasten me on the track to basic understanding. The written word was a separate beast entirely, although my comprehension had come on well with a little drilling on the fundamental concepts; I had stopped viewing this strange alphabet as a picturesque-yet-useless procession of symbols, and had begun to understand them as something meant to be read and understood. This by itself was source of some small satisfaction, but it had been marred by a larger problem.

With increasing and distressing frequency of late, I had begun to run up against the limits of my expression. To truly put one’s feelings into words is hard enough at the best of times, but the added impediment of an alien tongue put it within a hair’s breadth of impossible for me. I had to content myself with such small, simple sentences, striking at the skin of what I meant without coming close to the heart; I knew that my friends had begun to characterise me by the pause I took before speaking, when I hurriedly lashed words together into some approximation of my true thoughts.

After thirty pages of meticulous plodding between the lines of the book (a guide to the plants in the local area, which I had picked for its lovely pen-and-ink naturalist drawings more than anything else), my focus had waned to a sliver – one which snapped like an overdrawn bowstring at the tinkling of the telephone. I quietly set my book upon the floor and huddled closely to my duvet as Hime broke free from the whorls of her knitting and set about answering the caller. To see her on the phone was a rare treat, for she had established a reputation as the terror of telemarketers everywhere. Nobody could extract a half-hour of your profitable time as quickly and pleasantly as Hime could; she was of the opinion that people are more important for who they are than what they can sell you, and took a naked interest in the life of anybody who dared call us. The force of said interest had resulting in grown men pouring their hearts out over the phone as she listened patiently, and it wasn’t unknown for them to simply forget what they were trying to sell.

The best thing of all about eavesdropping on Hime’s phone conversations was that she smiled quite as brightly as if she had been talking in person. She had a fine smile, all the more admirable for the speed and frequency with which she deployed it. In comparison, everybody else seemed glacial in their expressions. Nath never smiled all at once, but little by little, as the sun breaks over the horizon and eases into a new day, and mountains changed their faces quicker than Suguri did.

“Hello! How wonderful to speak to you… Oh? Oh, no, not at all. You are never a bother, my dear. Always a pleasure…” she spoke into the mouthpiece, although the flicker of emotion across her visage gave the game away. Some people’s desire to truncate a phone conversation is quite equal to Hime’s skill in elongating them, and as the hostess, she was obliged by politeness to yield. “I assume you’re calling for Sora? Of course. I shall pass you you over to her,” she carried on, and covered the mouthpiece with her long, slender fingers. She turned to me and winked. “It’s Nath. She says she wants your help with something.”

My seat was jettisoned backwards, such was the immediacy with which I rose. Hime tossed me the phone with an easy underarm throw; I plucked it carelessly from the air and began speaking, only to discover that in my excitement, I had begun a conversation with the wrong end of the phone. I righted it and began again. “Yes.”

“ _Oh, Sora. It sounded like the reception was bad for a moment,_ ” Nath returned; her voice was quiet, although she sounded like she was speaking forcefully. She had, if my gut feeling was to be trusted, dialled the number with her feet and was sitting hunched over, so she could speak into it without having to pick it up. “ _I need your help with something.”_

“Yes.” Sometimes, and much to my relief, a tone of voice can say much more than the composition of what is said. In this case, my voice could leave no doubt, or room for further questions.

“… _wait, that’s it? You don’t even know what I’m asking yet.”_ Even over the phone, her voice was curled with a tinge of amusement.

“Doesn’t matter.”

“ _I could abuse that so easily.”_

“You’re you, so you won’t.” I brushed the suggestion away. For me, there were some parts of being a soldier that I had yet to overcome, and did not really want to. Part of that was the readiness to live and die for the sake of the people on my side – and Nath was definitely one of those people. I informed her that I would be there in twenty minutes, although privately I thought I might make it in ten with a good tailwind, and put the phone down. (For reasons that should be obvious, I am also not enamoured with long phone conversations).

Hime, who for all her refinement has no particular reservations about eavesdropping, took me to the side. “If you’re leaving, make sure you take a coat. It will be very cold out there. Oh, and I left some cookies in the jar. Take them with you and tell me what Nath thinks of them, won’t you?”

I nodded my assent: not, of course, because I had been covertly sampling those very cookies when I thought I would not be noticed, but because Hime is also on the very short list of people who I would fight, kill and die for. After only a minute or two of preparation I was out of the house and on my way, the cruel wind teasing tears from my eyes; Hime, waving me off at the entrance to the house, faded quickly into the distance.

* * *

 

In some respects, I have led a blessed life. There are many people in this world that will never know a true miracle, and nowadays it seems that my life is composed of those and nothing else. The fact that the world is here to begin with, when it was so very nearly destroyed in my time, is a miracle. That I somehow lived through the experience is a second. From there, they have unfolded easily, one after another: that the first people I met when I awoke were strong enough to restrain my rage; that I awoke in a time of peace to begin with; that my new friends were prepared to take me in, and give me a peaceful life; and, far from the least, my chance reunion with Nath.

To this day, I have still not asked why Nath called out to me when she saw me on the street. Closure, perhaps, after ten thousand years? Or just plain bewilderment at seeing a face she had consigned to history? In retrospect, it was equally unlikely that I should have gone with her, completely alone and without my weapons; we had been enemies, albeit unwilling ones. But I was lost, not just in town but in the world at large, and the lure of somebody familiar and nostalgic was too great to resist. Indeed, it seemed she had been placed there to answer that need for me, and soon I had decided that she would answer another, that we would be friends since I had not yet made any of my own. (Suguri and Hime, and I mean this in the best way possible, do not count. They are family to me, as much as anybody has ever been).

It was, I admit, both childish and selfish of me to cling to her like that, without any genuine knowledge of her character. We had exchanged a few words in a war, once; did that really mean we knew each other? But before long, I had observed her, and learned the fundamental truths that I still believe about her to this day.

She is – and I believe this with all my heart – a large person with many small, beautiful things within her. The changes in her expression are so gradual that you must focus deeply on her to see them at all, and yet once you do, they are as clear as day; in so many small and quiet mannerisms, her character is writ bold for the world to see. If you stand next to her, she will slouch ever so slightly so you do not feel short in comparison. When she walks, she curls her toes at the end of each step, like a cat kneading on a duvet. She cannot tell a joke, but bravely continues trying where lesser people would have given up.

And, as I had observed during our trip to the lingerie store, she likely knew of some secluded and private beach, for she had not a single line of untanned skin on her body, and I doubt she would be so bold as to bare herself beneath the sun with other people around to admire the sight.

Those thoughts, among others, kept me occupied on the flight over – a blessing, as the sky had arrayed itself with thick, dark clouds that hung low with the weight of snow in their bellies. Although snow was preferable to thunder, neither inspired comfort or confidence within me; winter had in my opinion lingered far beyond its welcome, and I had already begun casting my mind forward to spring, when there would be flowers of every type dotting the wilderness and turning the landscape into a feast of colour from a bird’s eye view.

Although inclined by habit to let myself in from the balcony, as indeed was Nath herself, my instincts told me it would be better to knock on the door when I came to the apartment. I took the stairs two at a time; although I could easily have flown up them, I was beginning to realise the joy of exercising once again. I had trained precious little since I awoke, and if I hesitated any longer I was sure to run to fat. Furthermore, my body had been made, from the bottom to the top, to be in motion; how I ever sat still for so long before was a mystery to me.

I rapped the door with my knuckles; it was opened a good minute later by a rather dishevelled looking Nath, who was wearing a sweater of duck-egg blue and a skirt that had been put on with obvious haste. I surmised that she had very recently finished a shower, for the tips of her hair were beginning to curl where they were too fiddly for her to dry with a towel, and she smelled strongly of green apples.

“You’re early. I only just had time to get dressed,” said she, by way of greeting; to me, that seemed a fine reason to be even earlier next time. Of course I said no such thing to her, since I was almost certain to miss-phrase it and launch us both into a sea of awkwardness. Instead I smiled – prettily, I hoped – and she stood aside to grant me entry.

“Getting cold out there,” she said, when I was comfortably seated on one of many cushions. Tables were simply not an option in her household, and without tables there was little point in chairs; instead, she had arranged a ring of cushions around the perimeter of the room, and kept the centre clear for eating and working with her feet. She also kept the lights dimmed, so it was as though the room was lit by candles; she loved candles, she had confided to me, but she felt them too much a risk to light. “I can fix you a hot drink. I have tea, coffee. No hot chocolate.”

“What will you have?”

“Mulled wine. Just the one cup, though.”

I licked my lips despite myself. Wine is not generally to my tastes, but I knew Nath to have a fine stock of it, and a fantastic recipe for mulled wine to boot. There is something to be said about a drink made with the finest ingredients, by a woman with fine tastes and millennia of experience. However, I still had Hime’s cookies in my pocket. I took them out for Nath to see, and answered: “Tea is good.”

She nodded, and filled the kettle with water enough for two before folding herself onto a cushion opposite mine. I watched her as she moved, as I had often taken to doing. Due to the extensive internal modifications she’d endured, Nath was heavier by far than her size would suggest; yet, she didn’t lumber, and her tread was as quiet as a cat’s. I asked gently how she managed to be so quiet around the house.

“I have practice. A lot of it is about balance, and a lot of balance is about body strength,” she explained, to the background sound of a slowly rumbling kettle. “Have you ever seen a ballet dancer?”

I shook my head. There was much in the world that I hadn’t seen and didn’t know, for reasons I couldn’t control. Sometimes I felt ashamed of those great gaps in my experience, but tried not to.

“I’m sure Hime will show you at some point. Anyway, the concept is similar – you need a good, strong core. In my case, I need a strong core just to move around,” she continued. “Humans are built on the assumption of two legs, two arms and a head. If you start removing things, it throws off the balance of the whole structure, and the core needs to compensate.”

I nodded; it made perfect sense to me, and I had seen evidence to bear it out. My second observation when I had joined her in the changing rooms was that she was fabulously toned, particularly at the abdomen, and had thick slabs of lean, sculpted muscle around her shoulders and upper back. I was almost envious of it, and if I was truthful it was one of a few driving reasons for my attempts to get more exercise.

Presently the kettle had boiled, I had brought two cups of tea into the living room, and Nath was good-naturedly trying one of Hime’s cookies. They were, perhaps, just a tiny bit burned, but they had been made with love. Love, copious amounts of sugar, and enough butter for a farmer’s market. She had received the recipe from an old friend that I had yet to meet, and hadn’t quite managed to replicate the results.

“Hm. Not bad,” was Nath’s verdict, and I was forced to concur; they were a touch too sweet for tea, but coffee would have suited them. “Anyway. I wanted your help with something.”

I sat up straighter on my cushion, and bade her to continue with a nod of the head. She rose from her seat, and brought out a binder from one of the shelves.

“One of my contacts sent me something. Some old design documents from our time. I don’t think they’re blueprints – specifications, from what I can tell,” she said, letting the binder fall open on the floor and flipping through the pages with her toes. “It was on an ancient data chip, so I had a nightmare trying to get it printed.”

“It still worked,” I pointed out.

“Yeah. Those scientists back then sure built stuff to last,” she said, and winked at me to let me know it was a joke. Of course they built things to last; if they hadn’t, neither Nath nor I would be having this conversation. But I felt I had missed some point in what she had said before, and fumbled my way back to it.

“From what you can tell?”

“That’s where you come in,” she said, continuing to flip the pages. Eventually she settled on one. “Recognise those characters?”

I let my mouth fall open as a wave of nostalgia overtook me. Of _course_ I recognised them. Were they not the same blocky, reassuring letters I had grown up with as a child? And this was _my_ language, too, so easy and light. The new tongue, I felt, was like building a wall; I had to construct the sentences brick by laborious brick. Language shouldn’t be like that. Speaking should be like flying. The text, the text was dry and scientific, but that instant flash of comprehension was almost addictive, especially compared to this morning when I had fought for every sentence.

“Hey. I never thought I’d say this, but you’re talking too fast. Slow down,” Nath instructed, her brows furrowing; it was only then that I realised I had been babbling, most likely in a broken mix of Ancient and Modern. “You can read this, then?”

“Yes. You can’t?” I asked, although the question came out as blunt as a hammer.

“It’s been a few thousand years since that alphabet was in common use. It’s true what they say – if you don’t use it, you lose it. Truth be told, I can’t even understand the dialect anymore. I don’t know what you were saying just now, but it was gibberish to me.”

“You can’t? Not at all?”

She shook her head dourly, and I, too, was dismayed; it would have been so much to fun to have a language for just the two of us, like a secret code. Part of me couldn’t believe that she had forgotten, though I had no reason for doubt. There was just a singular portion of my mind that could not reconcile that what for me seemed like a recent part of life, was in fact buried under millennia of memories for her. Experimentally I slipped back into my mother tongue and said something of a private and delicate nature, that I would probably not repeat if I thought she would understand and will not replicate here. She gazed back at me with blank eyes, and I was at once relieved and sorely disappointed.

“Listen. I know you aren’t too comfortable with reading and writing our language yet, but I was hoping you might be able to translate these for me,” she said, and my mind latched onto the ‘our’. She hadn’t meant it that way. Of course she hadn’t. But she had still separated the groups: ‘us’, who speak modern, and ‘you’, who does not. My feelings must have shown, because after an awkward pause she began speaking quickly again: “But of course, only if you want to. I’m mainly looking for old specifications that might help me figure out these damn arm connectors, but in a way, stuff like this is our history. Either way, it’s not that important, and–”

I held up a finger for silence. I wanted to tell her that she didn’t need to justify it. She didn’t need to give a reason. She was Nath. She was my friend, and she wanted me to help her. I wanted to take that thought and say it in a way that meant something. A way that was beautiful. I couldn’t, so I just summoned up some words that did the job. “Of course I’ll do it. You’re you. It’ll be slow, though.”

Her shoulders relaxed, and slowly a look of relief settled across her features. “That’s fine. When you get to my age, you’re not in a hurry for anything. …Thank you, Sora.”

She took a deep sip of her tea, and for a while the prevailing mood was one of sweetness. I had settled down to look at the binder a little more by the time she spoke next, and when she did, she spoke haltingly, like a horse trying to find purchase on a slippery mountain road.

“Just to… uh… clear this up. I didn’t…” – she paused for a deep breath – “…make friends with you, because I wanted you to do this for me. It’s not like I had an agenda.”

I frowned, puzzled. “We’ve been friends for a long time.”

“We met in… what? Spring? Summer? It’s been half a year. Half a year is _nothing_.”

I screwed up the courage in my breast. Nath, for all that she was wise and capable and not as prone to silly antics as Hime or I, was wrong. She was wrong, and the fibre of my spirit would not permit it, and my heart would not permit it, and even my tongue, which disobeyed me day after day, would not permit it. If she argued I would refute her, and if we were to clash then I would throw myself into it whole-heartedly, for if this point was allowed to stand then we would forever be distant and never close enough to touch. So I let my words ring out with full conviction, language be damned and all obstacles thrust aside. I spoke with my heart, and bade her answer:

“Half a year is _everything_.”

For a moment she was shocked, and I saw the beginnings of many feelings flicker across her face. Hurt, because I had been forceful. Confused, because I had been sudden. Worried, because I had been angry. But those things were transient, gone in the space of seconds, and replaced by something great and small at the same time. A single drop of water, falling into a still pond. A moment of realisation, of stillness coming into motion.

“Yeah,” she said quietly, and closed her eyes as if in bliss. “Yeah. I think you’re right.”

I allowed myself to smile; perhaps the look on her face was just a mirror of mine. “I’d like another.”

She looked at my mug, which I had put my hands on without even realising it, then up at me. “Another cup of tea?”

“Another half a year. And another after that.”

“Maybe. If you’re on your best behaviour,” she said, and stood up. “I don’t know about you, but I’m having some mulled wine.” She glanced over at the balcony door, and the thick, dark clouds beyond. “Looks like a snowstorm. If you don’t want to fly home in bad weather, you can stay the night. I have a sleeping bag.”

With the mention of sleeping bags we had arrived upon a subject in which both my knowledge and my enthusiasm were voluminous, and I accepted the invitation without pause. I was amazed at the ease with which passion loosened my tongue, a cup of wine loosened Nath’s. We spent an afternoon in chatter, and when night came, I found I had gotten no reading done at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is something of a failed experiment. I was trying to find a first person perspective voice for Sora, whose mother tongue is antiquated in this setting, to try and express the gulf between her ability to perceive and her ability to communicate what she's feeling; the style model was Jane Eyre, and I don't think I even really got that right. In the end, I don't think it worked very well, but sometimes experiments don't.


	25. Thigh Alert

NoName laid back, looked up at the stars, and began to contemplate thighs.

It wasn’t the first time that he had contemplated thighs. Actually, he had been in a near-constant state of contemplating thighs, ever since the fateful day where he clawed his way out a malfunctioning biovat and hawked a gallon of artificial amniotic fluid out of his lungs. The love of them was inscribed upon his very bones – probably his thigh bones, but there were a number of other obvious candidates.

In his long meditations, he had reached several truths about the nature of thighs. They were, he felt, what separated humans from beasts. He knew of no animal, other than a human or an ape, that possessed a thigh, and if they existed he didn’t care because it wouldn’t support his point. They were therefore an evolutionary pointer, a sign for the minds of feeble protohumans as to what was acceptable to lust after. He held as a self-evident truth that if nature intended something it was morally pure, and that man should never strive to be greater than what he had been born as.

His second truth, and the one he had worked hardest to attain, was the truth of the perfect thigh. Thighs were at their best shortly after being shaved – _not_ waxed. This was an amature mistake, he felt; it reduced the vital essence of the limb. Rather, there should be a light sprinkling of hair, just enough to provide some counterbalance to the smooth, muscular texture of a well-toned thigh – like a fine dusting of sugar on a sumptuous cake. Furthermore, thigh composition was important. Like other delicious meats, there should be a certain balance between fat and muscle. Too or too much of either could reduce the thigh from being a paragon of anatomy to being just another accessory to a female body.

The third truth, the one that was dancing tantalisingly before him, the one he had approached yet shied away from so many times, was the idea that thighs were at their best in the wild. He didn’t want to believe it, because he had always wanted to have power over thighs. Power in general was very attractive; if he were perhaps a different man, on a different path, power over others would be the one thing he lusted after most. But the thighs, the thighs were more important. And they looked so good, so pure, so _transcendent_ when given willingly.

Many men would have taken this as a sign that they should maybe start dating. They would use it as a chance to cultivate themselves romantically, and seek out a partner whose thighs they could adore forever after without need of financial recompense. NoName was not most men, because NoName had somewhat different metrics for the word ‘willing’. Mostly his version involved being conscious and not brainwashed, and not many parameters other than that. It would be nice, he thought wistfully, if they would not scream, or call the police, or fire giant laser cannons at him, but that seemed like an ideal world that didn’t exist – a Shangri-La he could never enter.

He sighed, and rolled over to face the town fountain. He liked the town fountain, because it had a very wide rim that he could sleep on. He also liked it because people sometimes threw pennies in there to make wishes, and the metal impurities entered the water and poisoned the birds. This, he felt, was very symbolic of the idea that you could never achieve your wishes without hurting another living being, as well as being a great source of pennies. He loved pennies; although he had a decent although variable income as a travelling hobo who occasionally sold off very dangerous and powerful robotics to arms dealers, he was still the type to pay for all his goods in single pennies and very much enjoyed painstakingly counting them out as the clerk got angry at him but tried to hide it. Sometimes the clerk just weighed the pennies, which was very annoying for him but meant he got his hundredweight of candy quicker.

Unfortunately, a man of his discerning tastes made many enemies amongst the women of the world, and some of them had taken to sneaking up when he was on the fountain’s rim and giving him a nice, hard shove towards the water, and as he attempted to astrally project himself into the Elemental Plane of Thighs, somebody did just that. He came up wet, irritated, and with pennies in his mouth.

It was then that he saw her – a true vision of beauty, walking along the cobbled streets of the town. She was tall, straight-backed, with fluffy blue hair and a cold, piercing gaze. She was, he thought, well built below her long dress; certainly, she had a bust that was restrained yet abundant. But most importantly, she had _no arms_. That meant that her thigh-to-body ratio was the _highest of_ _any woman_ he had seen in this entire, boring world. It was love at first sight. It was destiny. He was going to marry this woman, and he would reform himself as a man and she would let him shave her thighs in the shower for her so he could enjoy them later. What he wouldn’t give for a gust of wind right now, a hurricane to spirit up the hem of that long, drifting skirt! They were all the more tantalising for being so prudishly hidden. He didn’t need to see all of the thigh. Just a centimetre above the knee. Just a centimetre would do. Was a centimetre so much to ask? Was the wind so lazy as to deny him a mere centimetre?

The bowling ball of love had been thrown down the alley and knocked over all the pins in his heart – no, all but one, which was still standing firm, erect and rigid. He rose from the fountain, and was about to go sloshing towards her like an incredibly handsome and rugged swamp monster when, to his great concern, he saw another girl. Talking. To his beloved. She was blonde and she was pretty and he hated her immediately, but oh, oh, her dress was short, short enough to leave half a full handful – maybe a hand-and-a-half – of delicious meat between the hem and the knee, protected only by a thin layer of dark pantyhose. Pantyhose was second only to knee-socks in the arsenal of the temptress, enough to obscure the thigh itself but thin enough and tight enough to pick out every single beautiful contour, and so, so… _fragile_. He frantically simulated the thigh underneath in his mind, and found it pleasing and sumptuous. The remains of an athletic physique that was slowly going squishy, a wonderful harmony between strength and softness, tone and texture, muscle and fat. If the blue-haired woman was an angel, a representation of the platonic ideal of the thigh, then this girl was a devil, a temptress designed to pull him down the wrong path and smother him in an empty but very enjoyable hell.

The thing he hated most about the blonde girl was that she was walking side-by-side with the object of his affections, with not one, but _two_ bags of groceries in her hands. They had been shopping together, for food, which strongly implied they were living together. Maybe even as lovers. The blonde girl was also chivalrously carrying his angel’s food for her, which should have been _his_ job. Well, actually, he would never do it because manual labour was for plebeians, but the implication remained. She represented the possibility that his soulmate, the one woman who (probably) fit his overly shallow and specific criteria for female beauty, was taken. Possessed by somebody else. (It also meant he couldn’t rely on desperation or loneliness as a means to worm his way into his future lover’s heart, which he had kind’ve been counting on.)

_Still_ , a small and optimistic voice said inside his mind. _Maybe this isn’t a bad thing. Maybe you don’t have to pick between an angel and a devil. Maybe… Maybe you can have both._ The thought brought new and terrible strength to his weary psuedo-hobo muscles, and joy to his withered heart.

“Excuse me!” he shouted. This, he felt, was a good start, because even though it was rude to shout at people, he wasn’t shouting anything overtly offensive this time. “You, the tall and beautiful one with no arms!”

She glided to a halt like a stately ghost, that long skirt fluttering infuriatingly at her ankles. She looked him up and down, and the surprise showed on her face before the disgust – a good sign. His heart, already swelling with passion, pounded as he felt her cool glare on his face.

“You’re fearless, aren’t you?” she asked, and her sweet voice was like a symphony to him.

“If ever my heart contained fear, my sweet, it was banished by the sight of you,” he said, in what he hoped was a sophisticated voice. His usual pickup line went something along the lines of ‘give me your thighs!’, but he was making a special effort. “I was so taken by your beauty that I had to stop and give you a compliment.”

The two girls looked at each other, and something silent and powerful passed between them. By the time they looked back at the strange, bedraggled and very wet man in front of them, they had seamlessly transformed from two women shopping to a single, unified partnership.

“Have I met you before?” the blonde asked him, tilting her head.

“No, at least not in this timeline. I would have remembered a lovely… face, like yours,” he replied.

“Well, sorry. You’re novel, I’ll give you that. But I don’t carry change. No pockets,” the blue haired woman replied, and looked at her friend. “You?”

“I have pockets. But I wanted to try all the types of candy, so I spent my money on that.” She turned to look at him, with something approaching pity. “You can have some candy if you like. I have enough to share some.”

For a moment, his heart was touched. Even though people invariably assumed he was some kind of beggar, hobo or scam artist, not one of them ever gave him any change, much less their own hard-earned candy. What a noble heart this devil, this temptress, had! It was all he could do to stop tears of gratitude from springing to his eyes. But more important than candy, and more important than kindness, were thighs. Soft, supple, juicy thighs.

“I would love to take you up on your offer, but…” he began, sweeping his hand melodramatically across his brow, “…there’s something far _sweeter_ I’d like from you ladies.”

The wind seemed to turn chill, and all the softness fell out of the girls’ faces. One moment, they were two (almost) ordinary women enjoying a day in town together, and the next they seemed almost… military.

“Alright,” his beloved said, but her voice was so gruff, so charmless now. “Keep your hands where I can see them, and keep your distance. I won’t warn you twice.”

Her tone was withering, and the words should have shattered his heart, pruned his hopes and punctured his ego. But alas; he had heard them too many times, from too many women. The best thighs were given willingly, but any thigh was better than no thigh, and he was a man always willing to resort to Plan B. He opened his jacket and whipped out his ballistic fist, brandishing it with a smile as wide and sharp as a shark’s.

“I don’t take no for an answer. I wanted to do this nicely, but… You,” he said, and gestured towards the tall one with his weapon, “are going to come and entertain me for the day. I like you, so I’ll even let you go afterwards! That is… unless you want me to crush your friend’s pretty little skull. Now. Come here. Slowly.”

She gave a short, frustrated huff, and threw a look to her companion before taking a slow step towards him. What else could she do? He was armed and she – he sniggered at his own joke – was very much not. He felt elated, delighted at the thought of thighs to come.

If he had been perhaps a little less delighted, he would have realised that neither of the girls were looking at his weapon. They were looking at him – at his scrawny physique, his less-than-impressive stature, his irritating grin. They were evaluating. Calculating.

He was, therefore, surprised when his angel’s second step was not actually a step, but a lunge. One that ended in a headbutt. A headbutt with all the weight of a charging bull behind it. His vision went blank for a fraction of a second, and when it returned the blonde was already upon him, moving with hideous and unnatural speed. Almost gently she pulled the ballistic fist from his hand and tossed it carelessly to the ground. Less gently, she drove her fist into his solar plexus and sent him tumbling to the ground like a child’s doll.

Splayed out on the ground, he had enough time to take one aching gasp before the blue-haired woman closed the distance. She stood over him, like a conquering champion, and raised her leg up high. He registered dark shadows where her dress lifted, saw just a glimpse of toned and muscular flesh. Then, like a pile driver firing a stake into the ground, she brought her boot down on his groin.

“I don’t think he’s going to get up from that,” she said, when the earth had stopped shaking from the stomp. There was only so much pain a human body could take before they passed out. “Sora, make sure you don’t leave that fist lying around. They shouldn’t give weapons to lechers or idiots.”

“Roger.” She picked it up gingerly, holding the pinkie finger almost between her thumb and forefinger. “It smells pretty bad. So sweaty...”

Nath looked at the passers-by, who were slowly clustering into a crowd. “Somebody call an ambulance for this guy. Or don’t. I’m not sure surrounding a pervert with nurses is really the best idea.”

She gave a deep, heavy sigh, and jerked her head in the direction of her apartment. It was time to leave. Time to leave, and then shower, and pretend none of this had ever happened. Sora gathered up the grocery bags, carefully balancing the fist on top, and followed in her wake.

“Nath?” she said. “The world got really weird since I went to sleep, didn’t it?”

Nath shuddered. “You’re telling me.”


	26. Movie Night

If you had to live one day in the life of some other creature – one day with paws, scales, feathers, or chitin – there were far worse creatures to change places with than Nath’s cat. The morning had seen them besieged with light, downy snow that quickly packed itself into thick layers until it lay like a cold duvet on the pavement. Nath, looking out of her balcony window at the winter scene, had seen the tell-tale pawprint track leading to where her feline friend waited for her outside the apartments, and (after checking nobody was looking) descended to collect him. 

Once inside, he had been ensconced upon the softest cushion in the house, plied with a tin of tuna and left to his own devices. The only things demanded of him for this princely treatment was that he was occasionally subject to bursts of spontaneous affection from his attendant humans, and that he didn’t lick Nath’s eyebrows with a fishy cat tongue. The former was easy to manage; the latter, not so much.

There was another visitor to the house that day, and it was Sora. To Nath’s great distress, somebody had given her a hat. This was a terrifying prospect, because although would it keep the warmth from escaping Sora’s head, it would also trap all the strange and mysterious thoughts that usually percolated safely out into the atmosphere before they had chance to be acted upon.

“I’ve come to do cultural studies,” she said as she came in, which was both admirably vague and made her sound like an alien. (To be fair, she  _did_  live with Hime). Thankfully, Sora was far more likely to say ‘take me to your kitchen’ than ‘take me to your leader’.

Nath’s kitchen was, in fact, a source of perpetual fascination for her. It was full of gadgets, because anything that let Nath avoid chopping vegetables with a knife held between her toes was a Good Thing™. There were buttons to be pressed, whirs to be observed, settings to be unsettled. She had made overtures towards the coffee machine that the coffee machine was not returning, and had resolved to give it a piece of her mind when Nath was out of earshot. (The coffee machine did not accept flattery as payment. It demanded the ritual sacrifice of one goat per month, and Nath was in permanent arrears. Sometimes with an hour of prayer and some scented candles she could wheedle a shot of espresso out of it, and it was the best damn espresso she had ever tasted).

Fortunately, the cat attracted Sora’s attention long before she got within arm’s reach of any unguarded cutlery. One moment she had been tracking a course straight for the pantry; the next, she had collapsed to the floor like a house of cards, all the better to pet the cat.

“Hello, Mr Roger. How are you? Tell me about your day, please,” she said. Mr Roger, upon learning that he was not called Major or Whisper or Kaze or Cinnamon today, began to purr. Sora spoke more politely to the cat than any other living being, and often had long, involved, utterly one-sided conversations with him, because the cat couldn’t judge her if she got the words wrong and ended up talking nonsense. Which she did, routinely and much to Nath’s amusement.

“So, what are we ‘culturally studying’?”

Sora rolled over and looked at her upside-down. Her hat, which looked hand-knitted and had rather more in the way of pom-poms than a respectable hat should have, fell off her head. “The night… of miracles!”

For a moment, Nath pondered the likelihood that Sora had unwittingly joined some kind of bizarre doomsday cult and was about to preach her message to an innocent 10,000 year old superweapon and her adopted stray cat. After deciding that the odds were sufficiently in favour of ‘no’, she began the long and torturous process of making Sora explain anything.

“Explain.”

The blonde girl rolled over and pulled a small data disk from her pocket. She was a huge advocate of pockets; someday, somebody would introduce her to the concept of cargo pants or dungarees, and she would never wear a skirt again. “Suguri’s friend who looks like a pineapple told her it’s an old holiday and it’s coming up. They want to research it. So Hime looked on the web and found a bunch of videos, and we have to watch them and report back.”

“‘Friend who looks like a pineapple’. ‘Research’. ‘Have to’. Right.”

Nath sighed. She loved her new friends, she really did. (Anything under 100 years old counted as new, in her opinion.) But it seemed like every day held a fifty percent chance that she’d be roped into one of their bizarre schemes. Where did they all come from? It couldn’t be Sora, who, left to her own devices, was quite happy to spend her time doing her best imitation of a rug. A rug that snored, granted, but still a rug. It was unlikely to be Suguri, who from what Nath had gathered, spent the last 5000 years looking after the environment and eating cup noodles. And Hime, despite her mischievous streak, couldn’t possibly produce this many zany plans while also being busy with knitting, cooking, and consuming more ice cream than was safe for the human stomach. Yet, if you put the three together, they seemed to turn into a perpetual motion engine that produced only chaos and arguments about food. It was unfathomable. She had to stop going along with it.

But then again, she thought, it  _was_  snowing, and the cat was in. She couldn’t go anywhere while the cat was in – who knew what might happen? The ventilation ducts might get clogged with cat fur and set fire to the building. And it wasn’t like she had been planning to do anything particularly special with her day, anyway. It wouldn’t be such a huge sacrifice to use it for a movie night. And Sora would be happy, which had at some point made its way to the list of things in her brain marked ‘Important’.

“Fine, fine,” she sighed. “We can watch the videos. Go and dig my arms out of the closet and I’ll start setting up the screen.”

“We need popcorn, too,” Sora said as she climbed to her feet.

Nath frowned. “You won’t like popcorn.”

“But we’re watching movies together, so we have to have popcorn. I’ve never done that. I want to know what it feels like.”

“Have you ever heard popcorn being made?”

Sora tilted her head. “At the popcorn factory? Doesn’t it just come in a bag?”

“No. At least not the stuff I have. It starts as a bag of kernels, and then you put it in the microwave and they all start exploding with so much force that it turns them inside out,” she explains, her frown deepening. “It’s going to scare the cat, and it’s going to scare you.”

“Don’t worry. Me and the cat are the bravest. We won’t get scared at all.”

Nath rolled her eyes but held her tongue, and went into the kitchen to make some corn explode. When she returned three minutes later, both of her very brave friends had were hiding behind the curtain.

“I didn’t get scared. Mr Roger got scared, and I went to cheer him up,” Sora said fiercely as she emerged, with such conviction that Nath almost believed her. “Let me try it.”

She snatched up a handful and stuffed it into her mouth. There were many ways to eat popcorn – you could chew it, chomp it, snarf it, masticate it, gobble it, shovel it into your mouth-hole like a JCB scoops up gravel at a building site. But those are ways that people eat, and Sora had instead elected to bite down with the force of a saber-toothed tiger and crush the popcorn into a fine powder with her powerful jaws. She glowered as she finished atomising her snack.

“It’s good. I like it. I told you I’d like it.” She had that stubborn, prize-fighter set to her jaw again. “I wasn’t scared at all. Just because it sounds like ammo cooking off doesn’t mean I can’t eat it.”

“Oh, I see,” Nath replied lightly, raising her fluffy eyebrows. “Well, since you like it so much, I should probably cook some more.”

“No!” Sora said quickly, and a little too loudly. “That’s too much popcorn. You might get addicted. You’re scaring Mr Roger. No more popcorn for you.”

There followed a brief but intense negotiation of popcorn rights, ending only when Nath invoked the ‘my house, my rules’ clause of popcorn law. With the matter settled, they arranged themselves for optimal movie-watching: two cushions side by side, the bowl of popcorn in the middle, and the cat happily oscillating between them in his endless quest to soak up any love that was going spare.

For a few moments – the opening credits, specifically – everything was peaceful. But then, dominating the screen like a hydrogen blimp, a huge man in red took centre stage. He had a bushy white beard that shook when he talked, a huge, fat belly that shook when he talked, and was attended to by an army of elves who also shook when he talked.

“Nath, who’s that guy?” Sora whispered. Her hands were full of popcorn: truly, she had discovered the joys of eating and watching TV at the same time.

“I don’t know,” Nath hissed. “I feel like I remember him from somewhere, though. I think… maybe… he’s a superhero? It’s been a  _long_  time.”

“A superhero…? But he has all those tiny slave people. And listen to him laugh ‘Ho! Ho! Ho!’ I think that’s meant to be an evil laugh. Look, he’s breaking and entering!”

They watched in amazement as he somehow compressed his massive girth so he could slide through a space better-suited for a Victorian orphan, and, as silently as a winter night, stole through the house to leave some ‘gifts’ (probably bombs) under a tree before evaporating without trace.

“Why is he dressed in red? It’s not good camouflage,” Sora complained. “He’s trying to be a cat burglar, but he’s not very smart.”

Nath thought for a moment. “I… think it’s because he represents communism? Or capitalism. I’m not sure. He might be communist because he’s spreading society’s wealth around more evenly, but he might be capitalist because he’s encouraging everybody to go out and buy gifts for each other.”

“I think,” Sora replied slowly, “it’s because red means ‘danger’. He’s telling everybody that he’s a great warrior. Maybe there’ll be a fight scene.”

Unfortunately, the scene changed before the mysterious man in red could get into any fisticuffs, and instead the movie dedicated itself to trundling around after a group of children. It was a concept that Nath found fundamentally boring. She had tried to get behind the idea of children, and had accepted them as a grim inevitability if she wanted the human race to be alive and keep selling her groceries, but as a general rule she wasn’t interested until they hit the age of forty, at which point they had enough life experiences to hold a decent conversation.

She took the opportunity to steal a sidelong glance at Sora. To her surprise, the blonde girl’s gaze was riveted to the screen; it seemed the lack of sweet kung-fu action had not dampened her enthusiasm for the film in the slightest. Unfortunately, one of the benefits of being a highly advanced weapon of war was having highly advanced peripheral vision, and she soon noticed she was being watched.

“Look at the kids. They all look really happy,” she said, in a slow and dreamy voice. “The biggest thing they have to worry about is that Santa might not come. Not bombs, or guns. Just Santa. It’s the same way I’ve felt since I woke up. Like there’s nothing looming over my head. I’m… really happy, that the world became like this while I was asleep. That’s all.”

Nath sighed, and rolled her shoulders. Maybe if it had been somebody else – anybody else – she would have reminded them that the film was just a story. That the children were paid actors, and long dead at that. But did it really matter? The fact of the matter was that they had moved into a world where a happy movie – where a happy ending – wasn’t impossible, or even absurd. It sparked a thought inside her, and it felt too important not to let out.

“Hey, Sora. Hear me out for a moment, okay?” she said, and hesitated. “This is… probably a bad idea, but…”

“Tell me anyway. I’ll decide if it’s bad or not.”

She swallowed, cleared her throat. “On New Year’s Eve, this town has a fireworks display. I think it might be good for you to go. Don’t get me wrong – you won’t like fireworks. They’re worse than popcorn. Maybe even worse than thunder,” she began. “But… the whole town turns out for it. I think it would be good for you to go out and see some of the people living in this world. You might even make some new friends.”

Sora didn’t answer. Instead, she toppled sideways to rest her head on Nath’s lap.

“What,” Nath asked, “do you think you’re doing?”

“Getting comfy. You’re soft,” the girl replied, with the look of somebody who was very pleased with themselves.

“No, I’m not.”

“Okay. No, you’re not. Your thighs are all muscley. But I’m pretending you’re soft. Do you like fireworks, Nath?” She looked up with those deep, piercing eyes, and suddenly Nath realised her real motive for the lap pillow. She looked away, found her eyes locked to the screen.

“I was scared of them, at first. For the longest time, I thought they were… childish, somehow. Loud and garish. I wanted humanity to grow out of them. But then I realised that they’re expressive, you know? It’s like all the excitement about the year to come is trapped inside a bubble, and then you pop it and let everything out.”

“You’re right,” Sora murmured. “I probably won’t like fireworks. But I’ll try to like them. If I try hard enough, I might like them next year. Or the year after. Will you go to the display with me?”

“Of course.” She ruffled her hair a little. “I wouldn’t ask you to go somewhere where you’ll be scared and then not go myself.”

“I’ll look forward to it. Hey, Nath. All the people in the movie are buying gifts for each other. If I got you a gift, what would you want?”

Nath sighed. “Your questions are always so difficult.”

“That’s how you know they’re good questions.”

She feigned thinking for a second. “Well, I’d settle for my nose back. You never did return it.”

Sora grinned. “That’s because I’m a master thief. Even better than Santa. I’m just deciding what to steal next.”

“So far, you’ve stolen exclusively noses, hugs and popcorn. Somehow, I don’t think the world needs to be too afraid,” Nath said with a low chuckle. “Uh… That said, do you mind getting up? This is a little embarrassing.”

“Nope. Can’t get up. The cat’s sleeping on my tummy.”

Nath raised her eyebrows, and tore her eyes away from the screen. Sure enough, the cat had migrated to Sora’s abdomen and was curled up in a very cuddly, contented ball.

“Well. I guess that’s that, then.”

“That’s that.”

The movie ended with Santa having gone through some kind of redemption arc and the kids receiving dozens of gifts, none smaller than their heads. Another movie began, and neither Sora or the cat showed any signs of wanting to move. It was only when the girl began snoring that Nath realised that she had been tricked, and the master thief had already stolen her lap. Eventually, she began to feel drowsy herself.

That night she dreamed of rabbit ears, and couldn’t tell why.


	27. Festival (I)

“Hey, Miss Tall Lady! How did you lose your arms?”

The mother claps her hand over her little girl’s mouth and hisses quietly. The girl’s breath escapes from behind her fingers in clouds of white smoke. The cold is biting, even through a thick winter coat. Probably even through a fur coat, even if the fur was from a bear. In her heart of hearts, Sora thinks she’d quite like to be a bear on a cold evening like this. She’d quite like to be a lot of things.

Nath takes on the tired but gentle expression she reserves for dealing with children and idiots. “Well, you know how people say, ‘I’d forget my head if it weren’t screwed on?’ That’s just what happened. When I was born, my arms weren’t screwed on right, and I just forgot them someplace and never found them again. If you run across them, be sure to tell me, okay?”

“You can’t just _lose_ body parts like that, lady,” the girl replies seriously. “You would know for sure when they fell off.”

Sora steps forward. “You can. Watch.”

She opens her left hand as wide as she can, palm to the sky, and when she’s sure the girl is watching, shoots out her right hand to graze the tip of the girl’s nose. “See? You’ve lost your nose. I’ve got it now.”

The girl pouts. “That’s not my nose. My nose is still on my face!”

“How do you know? Can you see your nose right now?” Sora asks, before adding in a conspiratorial whisper: “I have her nose as well. Don’t tell her. I don’t think she’s noticed.”

Satisfied that no lasting offence has been caused, the mother gathers up her daughter, makes her apologies and flees to the food stands. Nath sighs deeply, and rolls her shoulders. She _knew_ she should have brought the arms, but no, she’d wanted to for the organic look. Now people are staring, as people tend to do when there are too many of them to feasibly headbutt into submission.

“Sorry about that. It happens when I’m out in public,” she says.

“It’s good, though. It means we can talk to a lot of people. You’re a good ice-breaker. Do you think we should get some shaved ice? Hime will be jealous.”

Nath struggles to keep her face carefully neutral. She _did_ ask whether Hime and Suguri would like to come to the New Year’s Festival, but they’ve apparently found some other way to fill their evening, and it probably involves flirting. Shaved ice is probably the very last thing on Hime’s mind right now, unless she’s very particular in her tastes.

Slowly, they trickle their way through the crowds, going stand to stand to see the amusements. Humankind has remembered three very important things from the times before the war: the foods they eat, the games they play, and how to overcharge for both. There are any number of ever-so-slightly rigged games offering prizes, and that number is equalled by the number of stalls barking to sell their delicious but unhealthy fried food. The smell of sizzling is in the air, and Nath finds herself eyeing the freshly-made doughnuts wistfully. All the best things are coated in sugar or coated in red-hot oil. Nobody ever makes street food she can eat with her feet. She’s distracted by Sora tugging at her sleeve, like the lady of the manor ringing a bell for attention. “Nath, you’re a gourmet. What do you recommend? I want to try something. Should we get a cotton candy, or a box of tiny fried things?”

“I’m not actually a gourmet. And it’s ‘some’ cotton candy, not ‘a’.”

“We get multiple but only pay once? That’s a great deal.”

“Not quite what I meant… Anyway, the cotton candy is sweet and has a strange texture, so a lot of kids like it. Fried food from stands like this tends to go great with a nice, citrusy beer.”

“I see,” Sora replies, pinching her eyebrows together as if this will help her to absorb the wisdom. “I’ll probably like the cotton candy more. Should I get some for both of us?”

“Well, I don’t mind, but… most stuff from places like this is designed for you to eat with your hands.”

Sora nods, and points a thumb at her chest. “It’s fine. That’s what I’m here for.”

“Oh?” Nath replies, lifting her eyebrows. “I thought you were just here to steal noses from naughty children, like an anti-Santa.”

“I’ll give it back when she’s earned it back. Yours too.”

Nath frowns, but lets the implication that she doesn’t deserve a nose fall by the wayside. “I still feel bad about having you feed me things when we’re out. It’s like you’re my seeing-eye dog or something.”

Sora shakes her head. “No, it’s not. Your eyes work fine. Do you want a cotton candy, or would you prefer a box of fried things?”

“I’ll take _some_ cotton candy. I won’t eat a box of fried things – I had dinner before I came out, like a responsible adult,” she replies, careful to exaggerate the playfulness in her voice. It’s easy to slip into monotone.

“Hey. I’m an adult, _and_ I’m responsible.”

“What for?”

“The Earth not being blown up.”

“Fair point.”

Nath smiles as Sora marches off to take her place in line. Slowly, their conversations are getting easier, less punctuated by empty silence; they have an ebb and a flow now, a give and a take. They aren’t quite on the same wavelength, but sometimes, their wavelengths intersect. Pieces of a puzzle, falling together. It’s been years, years upon years upon years, since she last had a relationship like that. She realises, all at once, how much she missed it.

“Nath, are you okay?” Sora asks when she returns, two sticks of cotton candy wobbling in her hands. “You look like you’re dreaming.”

She shakes her head, puts those private thoughts up on a shelf for later examination. “I was just thinking that we should probably get moving if we want to see the fireworks close up. They’ll start any minute now.”

Even in the low light, she sees Sora chewing her bottom lip. Wavering. Imagining being hemmed in by a hundred other people as explosions detonate above her head. The response, when it comes, doesn’t surprise her. “…Can we find somewhere to sit down instead? Somewhere out of the way. We can eat cotton candy and watch the fireworks from there.”

“Are you sure?” she asks. “We might not get a very good view.”

“That’s fine. We can get a good view next year.” The blonde girl furrows her brows. “Please.”

For some reason, Nath can only think that she’s cheating. It’s not fair if she asks for something like that. She’s usually so much more direct, moving straight towards the things she wants. She’s used to a Sora who’s just a little hard-headed. _That_ Sora just doesn’t take ‘no’ for an answer. _This_ Sora removes ‘no’ from the list of answers it’s possible to give.

They thread their way back through the crowd, moving against a gentle human tide. The atmosphere is relaxed and excited all at once; there are children laughing and running ahead of their parents, old men and women basking in quiet nostalgia for a festival that hasn’t changed since they were children themselves. As they move slowly away from the fireworks display, the crowd thins and the tide breaks, until they are left to themselves on the bumpy, cobbled roads.

“Are you worried about the fireworks?” Nath asks, sitting down at a bench near the town fountain. There are a few stragglers still heading towards the display, but so few that there’s still a sense of privacy.

“…Maybe a little,” Sora replies, and folds herself into the space next to Nath. “Here. Eat.”

She holds the pink cotton candy up to Nath’s mouth insistently. The smell of spun sugar fills her senses, and she takes a bite. Just a tiny bite, of course. More of a nibble. It’s been a long time since she last ate this kind of thing, so it’s not childish to enjoy it. That’s what she tells herself.

“Nath… Do you ever think about having kids?” Sora asks, and the question is so sudden she almost chokes on her cotton candy.

“Where did that come from?” she splutters.

Sora’s voice is slow and dreamy. “I was thinking about that girl from earlier. She wasn’t afraid of us at all. You’ve lived on the Earth for a long time, so you must have at least thought about it, right?”

“Well…” Nath begins, trying to find a way to dance around the topic. She wasn’t made for dancing. “It’s not… I mean, it isn’t really an option. People like us can’t have children.”

“You could adopt.”

“I could adopt,” she concedes. “But… I don’t know. I think I’d always be second-guessing my own motives. I feel like I’d always be in danger of treating them like a pet rather than a person, because they’re gone so quickly. I wouldn’t mean to, but it’s better to avoid standing on a slippery slope. It isn’t what I need.”

“What _do_ you need?” Sora asks, and her gaze is almost as powerful as her question. She speaks as though the question is rhetorical, as if she knows the answer and just wants to hear it from somebody else’s lips. Maybe this is the question she’s thinking about when it seems as though her mind is lost in space. Nath opens her lips her lips, trying to frame an answer she knows she won’t be able to take back once it’s been spoken.

There is a whistle and a bang; suddenly their faces are bathed in amber as the night sky springs to life. A constellation of sparks hovers overhead. Sora winces and the spell is broken, the moment lost. She huddles against Nath’s shoulder as more fireworks scream upwards to fill the sky with light.

“Are you okay?” Nath asks, turning her face to nuzzle the top of Sora’s head with her chin. It’s not a hug, but it’ll do for now.

“ _Auuuu_. It’s not fair. They caught me by surprise. It was a sneak attack,” the girl sniffs. “It sounded just like artillery…”

“I know. I know. At least they’re prettier than artillery fire. Do you see that one, that explodes like a ball?” she asks, looking skyward. “It’s called a peony, after the flower.”

It seems as though she has to make a deliberate effort to connect her gaze with the display, but eventually she does. When she speaks, her voice is low and controlled. “It looks more like a dandelion clock. I wish I could blow on it and all the sparks would fly away like a real dandelion.”

“You look like a dandelion, too. Yellow and scruffy at the top,” Nath teases.

“I’m not a dandelion. Hime’s more of a dandelion than me.”

“Oh, you’re right. Maybe you’re more like that one, over on the right – with all the sparks falling down. They call those horsetails, or waterfalls. One year, I forgot about the festival and went out flying when they set up the fireworks display, and I almost got hit by one of those. I flew in and out of the sparks like a salmon jumping upstream.”

“No way,” Sora says, and gives her a light punch in the side. She isn’t scared enough to miss when somebody’s messing with her.

“How about that one, then? That one’s a palm. See how it spreads out wide, like a palm tree?”

“I don’t think I’ve seen a palm tree before.”

“I have a few growing at my summer house. Remind me and I’ll show them to you. That one there’s a willow…”

She keeps talking, describing the fireworks in her calm, steady voice. She can’t outshout an explosion. But she can give Sora something else to focus on. Some other sound to listen to. She talks about gunpowder, about scaring away spirits and sending out salutes. New practices, and ancient history. It’s not a big town, and not a big festival; they run out of fireworks long before she runs out of facts. As the final shower of sparks fades in the sky and the last light washes over their faces, Sora doesn’t seem afraid at all.

“Nath… How do you know so much about fireworks?” she asks, after a good ten seconds. The last explosions were chased by a round of applause so loud they could hear it from the fountain.

“I told you before, but… a lot of the things that bother you right now also bothered me, right after the war. Except, I didn’t have anybody around to help me deal with it. Eventually, I figured out that I should try and learn about them. Rationalise them, I guess. The more I learned, the less scary they got. You want to hear about lightning? I can tell you all sorts of things about lightning.”

“...Nn. Maybe tomorrow,” Sora replies. “But right now, I wanna stuff myself with cotton candy and then go to sleep.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Nath says. She can see the tiredness creeping into Sora’s eyes. The aftershock of the fireworks. “You did really well tonight.”

Sora nods, and stands up on slightly unsteady legs. She runs a hand through her hair, as if checking how dandelion she is. “Let’s go home,” she says.

“My home, or your home?”

“They’re both home, so either is fine. But I want to see how Kaze is doing. He’s not as brave as I am.”

“So my home is your home, now? I appreciate the sentiment, but I’m not exactly overflowing with spare rooms or spare beds.”

“That’s fine. I don’t have a room or bed at Suguri’s house, either. I can do without them because I’m good at sleeping. I have the most practice out of anybody.”

They carry on the gentle back and forth as they walk home, unhurried despite the cold. There are clouds forming in the night sky; it will probably snow tomorrow. Sora thinks this is fine, because it gives her an excuse to hibernate, and inch closer to her goal of becoming a bear. Black clouds aren’t quite as scary as they used to be for her.

Perhaps they never will be.


	28. Calling a Spade

Suguri, it had to be said, was not in the habit of giving gifts. It wasn’t because she was stingy. It was more because it took her weeks upon weeks of deep meditation to decide what the perfect gift would be, and then because her her perception of time had been warped just a smidge by her advanced age, anywhere up to a year to actually go out and get it. Where she was fast she was fast, and where she was slow she was slow. That was just the truth of it.

Nevertheless, Sora woke up that morning to a bleary eyed Suguri holding a three foot long, badly wrapped package with her name on it.

“Ooh,” she murmured, appreciatively. It seemed like the appropriate thing to do. Truth be told, she was about as good at receiving gifts as Suguri was at giving them. Her eyes flicked from the package to Hime, who was watching with a quiet smile from her cosy armchair. That meant that there would be no bacon in the immediate future. Maybe the gift was just three feet of bacon, and they were waiting for her to unwrap it so they could have the world’s biggest breakfast. She had never seen three feet of bacon before, and felt vaguely excited at the prospect.

“Take it,” Suguri said, and thrust the package at her a little impatiently. She hadn’t had her morning hugs yet. Sora could tell from the way she was standing. She probably hadn’t had them because her arms were full of bacon, and Hime didn’t want to hug her while she had bacon in her arms. That would make them a bacon sandwich where Suguri and Hime were the bread, which Sora thought would be the exact worst configuration in Hime’s view. She would prefer a bacon and Suguri sandwich in which she was the filling, because that would mean she and Suguri were close to each other no matter where the bacon was. Or one where Suguri was the filling and there were two slices of bacon for the bread, and then Hime was the one doing the eating. It was a matter that deserved some serious consideration at a future time.

“Thank you,” she said, and took her package, which, now that she had a chance to hold it, was far too rigid to be bacon. Maybe it was a three foot box with bacon on the inside, which was even better than three feet of bacon because you got the box for free. She shook it experimentally, and was surprised to hear something metallic bumping against the cardboard. It wasn’t the kind of noise she expected her breakfast to make, even before it had been cooked. But maybe whatever was in the box was even better than bacon, although probably not as tasty.

Quietly, she settled down to unwrap it – an adventure in and of itself, since Suguri had used sticky tape and brown wrapping paper in a nearly 1:1 ratio, and then tied that up with string, and then applied another layer of her paper and sticky tape alloy. Eventually, though she broke through – and was delighted with what she found.

“It’s an _entrenc_ _hing_ _tool_ _!_ ” she gasped, running her hand along the illustrated design on the box. “So nostalgic…”

“…‘Entrenching tool?’” Hime mouthed, sidling up to Suguri. “I thought you got her a shovel.”

Suguri took a moment to comb her memory. “I think…they’re like shovels, but collapsible and specially designed so they can be used as hand-to-hand weapons? That one really is just a shovel, though.”

“Shovel?” Sora asked, looking down at the box. She said the word as if she was trying it out for the first time. Tasting it. “Ah… Sorry. I don’t know ‘shovel’. In my time, we had entrenching tools. That was all. Are shovels new?”

Hime and Suguri glanced at each other, although only one of them was silently begging to be extricated from the social situation in which Sora had accidentally put them. The other one was Hime, who was looking at Suguri because she was nice to look at. With a sigh, she set about the rescue.

“You really did grow up in a time of war, I suppose. Putting that aside for now, do you like it?” she asked, effortlessly sweeping away any strangeness in a way that neither of her companions could have.

“I love it,” Sora said, opening the box at one end. But there was a hitch in her voice, an empty pause that said a but was coming, and coming soon. “But… it’s too long. It should be half this length. It doesn’t look like it folds, either. The head is the wrong shape, too. It’s like a square, but it should be a triangle. You can’t sharpen the edges like this.”

“Yes, well, if we feel like we need a trench or for you to chop somebody’s head off, we’ll get you one of those. But I believe Suguri had something rather different in mind, correct?”

The silver-haired girl nodded. “Let’s go out to the garden.”

This, to Sora, seemed like a very strange idea. For one, she hadn’t really thought they had a garden. You could walk out of the back door and there was certainly a lot of grass and twigs and green stuff, but usually a garden had a fence or a boundary or something. Maybe Suguri just thought that the entire world was one big garden that belonged to her; maybe she separated the world into two compartments, which were ‘inside’ and ‘garden’. But even then, why would they want to go outside, where the cold was and the breakfast wasn’t? There might be breakfast outside, admittedly, but they would have to catch it first, and it probably wouldn’t be as sustainably farmed as theirs. (Suguri took a rather dim view of anybody skimping on the welfare of their animals to make greater profits, and as she was extremely dangerous, functionally immortal, and had helped humanity rebuild after Sora narrowly stopped them from becoming extinct, she had a touch more sway in the matter than might first be appreciated.)

Nevertheless, Sora picked up her new entrenching tool that wasn’t an entrenching tool, and marched out in the wake of her two friends. They seemed to have a plan for this new ‘shovel’, which was reassuring. She’d been excited at first because it gave her a kick of nostalgia, but that had waned since she discovered that it wasn’t really a holdover from her own world. Now she didn’t know quite what she would use such a ‘shovel’ for.

“This,” Suguri said, spreading her arms out wide, “all the way up to that hill, used to be my garden.”

It was a long, rolling stretch of land; their home was already at the top of the hill, and at the bottom there was a large flat leading up to the next. Now that Sora noticed, the levelness of the ground did indicate that it was manmade – or, at least, had been tended to.

“Originally, my mission was to restore the planet after the damage done in Sora’s time. So I’m proud of my cultivation techniques,” she went on. “I used to do a lot of gardening to pass the time, but I lost motivation at some point, and the land took it all back.”

“Oh. Is it because you spent too much time canoodling with Hime?”

Suguri grinned. “Firstly, it happened five hundred years before Hime even arrived on this planet.”

“And secondly, there’s no such thing as too much canoodling with Hime. I am a goddess, you know, and my canoodles are simply divine,” Hime added.

“That too,” Suguri said, and it was difficult to tell if she was joking or not. “But I thought… well. Maybe it would be nice if we all did some gardening together. I could teach you. It’d be… um. A family thing.”

Sora leaned on her shovel as she had once leaned on her sword, and looked out over the landscape. She didn’t really know anything about gardening. She didn’t really know much of anything, outside of what she’d learned in military bases. It was why Nath and Suguri, who seemed to know at least a little bit about everything they came across, seemed so impressive to her. She wanted to learn. Even if she didn’t like it, she wanted to try. It would be fun, and they could grow things for the kitchen. She nodded, gravely.

“I’d like that,” she said.

Suguri gave her a rare, warm smile. “Okay. We have a lot of space, so… We can all have our own plots. So you should both think about what you want to start growing. We’ll dig out the plots and prepare them in the next couple of days, so we can plant things in spring.”

“I think,” Sora said, after a moment of deep thought, “I want to plant grapes.”

“Grapes?”

“Mm. So we can make wine. Not much. But Nath likes it, and I think she would really enjoy it if we gave her a bottle we made ourselves,” Sora explained. “Can we do that?”

“There’s no reason why not. It might not be the best wine, and you’ll be waiting for a while. If you want to make wine this year, you could try planting strawberries. You could also plant roses and make rose hip wine. Cherries as well.”

“I see. Can we do all of them?”

“Of course. But for now, let’s start digging. Sora, take your shovel and–”

Sora shook her head. “Wait. Breakfast first, then gardening. Come inside. I’ll show you something we used to do in the army,” she said, picking up her shovel and departing. Suguri made to follow, but Hime caught her sleeve.

“Good work,” she said, low enough not to carry. “She seems excited. To be honest, I thought she could do with a hobby.”

“I’m excited, too. It’s been a while since I did any gardening,” Suguri replied. “What about you? We’re making you a plot. Do you have anything you’d like to plant?”

Hime smiled, as if remembering a private joke. “Oh, all sorts. I could always use some more carrots, of course, but there are so many flowers I should like to see in bloom. I think… lilies, first.”

“Lilies?”

Her hand found Suguri’s, and squeezed. “For purity, elegance… and love between women, of course.”

“I should have known.”

“You really should have,” she teased.

They walked back to the kitchen together to find that Sora had taken her brand new gardening tool and was using it as very unwieldy, ad hoc frying pan. Soon, they were feasting on a breakfast of eggs, toast, and (of course) bacon – by the shovelful.


	29. Collector

She rolls a coin between her thumb and forefinger, feels the rifled edge against her artificial skin. Minted three decades ago, she notes by long force of habit, but too small a denomination to be worth changing the mint frequently. On one side is a crest that means nothing any more, and on the other a dove, to symbolise peace.

Having contented herself that she doesn’t need it for her collection, she slots it into the vending machine and hears it drop with a satisfying clunk. She’s collected almost everything at some point or another. It doesn’t particularly matter to her what it is. All that matters is that it gives her a reason to get out of bed and stride out into the world again, and then, when she’s home with her prize, it spins into all sorts of other miscellaneous tasks to keep her busy: documenting, mounting, networking with other collectors, checking lists and reading books. She usually sells the collections off when she’s done with them, and donates some of the money to causes that catch her interest – usually robotics and natural disaster relief. But there are a few that are open ended, so she’s never really done with them. It’s important to have that there – a source of activity that won’t go away.

After a few seconds of fiddling with buttons, two cans of cold apple juice fall down. The day is extremely warm, even though Spring has only just begun. It won’t be long before the fields are carpeted with daffodils, visible even from the sky. There’s rain coming, too, the short and sudden showers that perk up the landscape and wash the pall of winter from the ground. She picks up the cans and presses one against her forehead, sighing gratefully as the condensation hits her skin.

“Here,” she says, and tosses the other can underarm in a low arc towards the benches. Her aim is a little off – throwing isn’t exactly her strong suit – but Sora plucks it out of the air with ease and cracks the seal eagerly.

“Ahhhh… So good,” she murmurs, after a four or five gulps. She looks back at Nath with furrowed eyebrows. “Is the ring pull okay?”

Nath smiles. Is the ring pull okay? Are the buttons okay? Are the chopsticks okay? Sora always asks it that way. She never says, “Can you do this?”, but always makes it seem as though the thing she’s trying to do is just broken or flawed in some way that would prevent her doing it. It’s a simple way around a complex linguistic problem, and it’s not meant to be condescending. In fact, just the opposite – Sora knows what she’s capable of. The answer to ‘Can you do this?’ is almost always yes.

“They’re annoying, but I can work them. I’ll save mine for later,” she says, and takes a seat on the bench, letting her companion lean up against her. “It’s only going to heat up as the day goes on.”

Sora groans, soft and low. She’s already sweating, which to Nath seems like a contradiction in terms. Sora shouldn’t _be_ sweaty. No Sora she has ever known seems like they should be able to sweat. In the war she was a sleek, idealised killing machine – some otherworldly thing, not a person. She had learned that wasn’t the case when they met; for a few precious seconds, they were both human, both fallible. Both hurting. And now? She’s just as otherworldly, but in a different way. Like a fairy, or an alien. Hime calls her a space cadet, which seemed the best way to sum up up her mysterious ways of thinking. She has a train of logic with no brakes and that pulls in at some very strange stations.

But sweat she does, although it always seems strange when Nath sees it. Today she spent most of the day gardening. Suguri and Hime had tied her hair up in a ponytail, given her some dungarees and a vest top, and sent her to attack what _had_ been empty space and was now looking like a passable allotment. When Nath arrived she had already developed sun-blushed shoulders and an insatiable lust for ice cream, and wandered over for a short and somewhat sticky hug. Nath had returned it a little dully; her brain was still stuck on ‘Sora with a ponytail’. It made her look brighter, cleaner. More girlish, insomuch as it was possible for a 10,000 year old war hero to look girlish.

“Do you want some of mine?” Sora asks, back in the present. She shakes the can, and a little liquid sloshes around the inside. Not enough. She looks at the can mournfully, as if she can convince the apple juice to undrink itself by looking sad enough.

“I’ll pass. You need it more than I do,” she replies, and something like relief washes over Sora’s face. She drains the rest of her can. “We’ll add getting more drinks to our mission objectives.”

“Roger.”

Of course, they’re not really on a mission. It’s more of a shopping trip – ice cream, seeds and bulbs, an office fan, and now as much fizzy drink as it will take to prevent Sora from collapsing in the heat. But they’ve both taken to calling their outings ‘missions’ – a dark joke, but a shared one. What kind of shopper Sora is seems to change with the phases of the moon. Sometimes she’s relentless in her desire to get in, get what she wants, and get out. Other times, she’ll peer through every shop window and stop to smell every metaphorical rose before she finally decides what she’s looking for.

Nath hopes that today is a rose-smelling day, herself. It’s been a little while since they last had a day out together. Since they came to watch the fireworks at the turn of the year. It seems like the garden has been taking up all of Sora’s time – all of her mind. Occasionally she rings up with some bizarre yet completely urgent question ( _Nath, what kind of fruit do you like?,_ or, _Nath, I need to know about barrels_ ) and they chat for a few moments, but neither of them is the type to spin out a phone conversation beyond what’s necessary. Part of her wonders if this new and busy life she had with Sora and her friends was just a momentary reprieve. She hopes it’s not the case.

“Nn. You’re thinking too hard. You’ll get wrinkles,” Sora says, gently tapping a finger against Nath’s forehead.

“If that was true, I’d be nothing but wrinkles by now,” she sighs, and climbs to her feet. “Come on. One of the places I wanted to stop has air conditioning.”

‘Air conditioning’, it seems, is actually a magical incantation to fully restore Sora’s waning strength, and she springs to her feet eagerly. “Where is it?”

“The comic book store.”

Sora tilts her head, as if by setting her brains cogs at a different angle she might figure out what’s going on. “Comic books? You like them?”

“Depends on which one. Some are good, some are bad. Why?”

“Suguri doesn’t like them. She says too many of them are based on her.”

Nath thinks for a moment, then shrugs. “I can see that. Flying, protects the environment, actually millennia old. If you put it like that way, she seems like she’d make a good superhero.”

“She says she’s fine with being a superhero. But they keep making her into a cryptid or a space alien and having people beat her up.”

“…Yeah, that’d work too, I guess.”

Despite her misgivings, it seems that Sora’s interest has been captured. Privately, Nath isn’t surprised; a more visual way of telling stories is perfect for a girl who still it laborious to read the language. She almost can’t bring herself to tell her that she’s just trying to find something to collect again, and she’s probably just going to pick a series, mount it and index it without ever actually reading an issue. She finished her last collection shortly before she re-united with Sora and met Hime and Suguri, and they’ve kept her too busy to start another one since. But now that things have lulled, it’s high time she started a new collection.

They reach the store, with its polished glass window affording a view of all the mixed issues, stored in laminated sleeves and set out in cardboard boxes along a great central table. The walls are lined with hard cover art books, graphic novels in bizarre and experimental styles, and weighty tomes of compilation stories. Inside are other weary shoppers, sheltering from the heat and browsing the most colourful offerings. Nath frowns. It’s a lot busier than she expected it to be.

When they step inside, the cool air hits them all at once. It’s only when it does that Nath realises that there is a sheen of sweat on her forehead, chilled by the breeze. Sora sighs in the same contented way she sometimes does before falling asleep on random objects, before immediately making a beeline for the clerk. Nath feels a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach.

“Hello. I’m new at comics. Can you tell me the best one, please?” she says.

“Uh, sure. What are you into?”

“I don’t know. Just show me the best one.”

The clerk makes a face that says he goes through this conversation about thirty times a week, and comes a little closer to hanging himself with each iteration. Feeling something like pity, Nath steps in.

“Sorry. She wants something that started recently – no complicated backstories that she’d need to know. Action… is probably good, but no war stories. Better to steer clear of superheroes, too,” she says, glancing at Sora. Something tells her that she won’t find the standard ‘flying brick’ quite as impressive as the average person. After a few seconds of brain-racking, the clerk points them to some of the racks and goes back to tapping at his monitor screen, content that the half-an-hour conversation about why there isn’t an objective ‘best’ comic has been avoided.

“Alright. I’m going to look through the loose issues. You check out the ones he mentioned. If you find one you like, pick it up and I’ll treat you,” Nath says.

“Roger. Thank you very much.”

Sora moves away a touch reluctantly to the new releases, and Nath cracks her artificial knuckles. (It was a feature, the techs assured her, and not a sign of shoddy workmanship). She had collected comics a few times in the past, but had always had to avoid the loose issues due to the problem of not having fingertips at the time. She had trained her entire life for this moment. She was going to find a nice, semi obscure comic, start in the middle of its run, and then collect both ways until she had them all. Something with a hundred or two hundred issues, maybe, all in one run. That was the ideal.

Quietly and professionally, she began her search. Having a good set of prosthetic arms was going to make comic book hunting so much more convenient. No longer would she suffer papercuts on her toes when she tried to put them in their sleeves. No more would she have to call over the staff to rifle through boxes upon boxes of pulp and paper for her. It was liberating. It was almost worth forgetting she had the arms on and getting them stuck in doors all the time, although not quite. Getting stuck in doors was her pet peeve. Usually they were designed for shorter people, with less heavy machinery on their shoulders.

Eventually, she ffinds what she’s looking for – a philosophical, slice of life story with an avant garde surrealist art style and a protagonist who’s an almost total non-entity, only caring about the contents of his wallet. She opens a copy of issue fifty and reads a few pages, to discover that it’s trash – beautiful, beautiful trash. It’s perfect.

“Nath. I found one.”

Nath did not jump when she heard Sora’s voice right next to her ear. Yes, her feet may have left the ground, and yes, she was a touch surprised, but really her legs just so happened to have become tired at that exact moment and she had taken flight to relieve the pressure on them. This is a very important distinction.

“It’s about these things called biplanes,” Sora continues, ignoring the fact that Nath is now half a foot off the ground. “They’re… I don’t know. I think they’re like helicopters, but sideways. That must be what the rotor on the front is for.”

She opens the book to show a full-page spread of what Nath can vaguely recognise as an ancient flying machine. The art is in soft colours with feathery outlines, transitioning to sharper lines and bolder colours when the dogfighting ensues.

“This one’s the main one. He’s Blue Buzzard. The girl is Red Rocket. Mostly they’re rivals, but sometimes they team up to fight pirates,” Sora explains, sagely. “They fight a lot, but they make up when nobody’s looking.”

Nath smiles. She already has a good idea of how this kind of comic goes. Sora believes she’s in for an action-adventure story of derring-do, but what she’s actually signed up for is a hundred issues of will-they-won’t-they romcom with occasional pirate beatdowns sprinkled throughout. But if this is the one she’s picked, then this is the one she’s picked. Maybe a little lighthearted romcom will do her some good.

“Alright. Take it over to the till. I’ll finish looking through this box and be right with you,” she says, and returns to flicking the covers. She doesn’t think she’ll find anything too interesting, but another issue or two of the one she’s got will set her collection off to a flying start. She’s just getting into it when she feels a tug at her sleeve.

“Why don’t you read it, too?”

For a moment, she struggles to keep the smile on her face. She doesn’t want to say it, but the comic that Sora likes is the exact opposite of the ones she’s looking for. If the series has just started, it’s too easy to collect – just grab a subscription and pick it up. No challenge. Even if it’s genuinely light-hearted and funny, it’s not like she’s going to read it. It’s all going to get put in dust-jackets and filed away before the series ends and she sells it as a set. It’s a waste.

But, there is a certain look on the blonde girl’s face. A certain longing in her eyes. It says, _Let’s share this together._ She could just as easily take the comic home and read it with Hime. Maybe even with Suguri. But instead she’s picked Nath. She can’t say no to that.

“…Alright. Go get another copy,” she says, her resolve crumbling. Maybe she’ll just collect this aeroplane comic on the side. A bit of fun. “Make sure it’s in good condition.”

“Roger,” Sora says, and strolls back to the new releases. There’s a spring in her step that wasn’t there before. It’s probably just the magic of air conditioning, Nath tells herself. Nothing else it could be.

When they’ve paid they step out of the shop to a day that is still razor hot, an outdoor furnace. The can of apple juice in her pocket is already warm. She thinks, perhaps, she’ll take Sora to the milkshake shop and they can enjoy some ice-cold drinks together. Maybe she’ll take a leaf through her new comics as well. It can’t hurt.

“Nath, Nath. What flowers do you like?” Sora asks as they begin the walk. “Hime wants lilies. Suguri says I can grow anything, though.”

“Pick a flower you like best, then.”

“I don’t know which one I like best. What’s the best one?”

“I don’t know the best flower, but I know the best milkshake.”

“Is it rocky road?”

“That’s a secret.”

“Muuu. I’ll just get the same one you get.”

“Then I won’t order the best one. You can’t outsmart me that easily.”

“Mean.”

In the event, Sora still orders the same milkshake as Nath. In fact, she says gravely to the shopkeeper, they should just make Nath’s milkshake twice as big and give them both straws, so they don’t have to wash as many glasses. The order is taken before Nath can protest. Within twenty minutes they both have brain freeze, although only one of them is blushing – and they’re both read the first issue of the Blue Buzzard, cover to cover.


	30. Festival (II)

Suguri is different in the way that she thinks of fireworks. For Nath, they are tradition; for Sora, they are a bad memory; for Hime, an amusement. She, however, has always seen them as the fingerprints of humanity upon the sky, which they cannot touch in any other way. From a bird’s eye view, they form a bright and beautiful map of all the places where people have settled on the land.

She’s wearing her winter coat, tonight, with a long scarf that trails behind her like the tail of a comet. It was her Christmas present from Hime, and she’s glad of it; although they’re at the very top of the stratosphere, where the air is warmest, it’s still below freezing. She _has_ been up to the very highest parts of the thermosphere, but that is a dead and lonely place, where there are so few molecules of gas that sound cannot travel. Occasionally she goes there to stargaze, where she feels – because she has the heart and soul of a human – as if she could reach out and touch the constellations, even though they are further apart than she can possibly imagine. Those bright and shining stars have existed since she was a child, and have never deserted her; although they are not her best friends anymore, they are certainly the oldest.

Much closer, and shining even brighter, is Hime. Her wings – beautiful, ethereal, the colours of the aurora – are on full display. Hime has told her that, outside of battle, they are soothing and warm to the touch in winter, and cool and refreshing in summer. She hasn’t worked up the nerve to ask if she can touch them herself yet. Maybe next year. All she knows is that in battle they are blinding, with enough heat to melt through steel.

“You seem excited,” she says. Although they are far apart, she doesn’t raise her voice. Somehow, she always hears when Hime calls for her, and that seems to work well enough in reverse.

“Of course I am,” Hime replies. Her voice is all but a purr. “It’s been a while since I had you all to myself. I do _adore_ having Sora around, but it does mean we have fewer opportunities for things like this.”

Suguri raises an eyebrow. “For fighting?”

“For _dancing_ ,” she says, and even from here Suguri can see the gleam in her eyes. “As only you and I can dance.”

“I’m always happy to be your partner. But if you feel like we don’t have enough opportunities, why not just invite Sora along as well? She’s no slouch.”

“You’re certainly correct about that. But what Sora does can’t quite be called dancing, I think. She’s so direct about it. Perhaps in the year to come, I’ll show her the motions and we can all dance together. But,” she says, and her voice is like honey, “Tonight, the only partner I want is you, Suguri.”

“You’re teasing me, aren’t you?” she asks. She’s not blushing, but she does smile. She’s getting a little more used to things being this way.

Hime’s lips curve into a satisfied little grin. “Perhaps. But it _is_ such a romantic night, don’t you agree? The night sky full of stars above us, the fireworks below, and a new year ready to unfold before our eyes. You can hardly blame me. I’m just starting the year as I mean to continue it.”

“Come on,” she says, and makes a show of frowning. “You can’t say things like that and then expect me to go full force.”

“Oh, but I do! I shan’t be holding back at all. I want you on your toes, Suguri, and I expect you to keep step. Are you ready to begin?”

She takes out her beam rifle, checks the output on her energy sword. Nothing fancy today, nothing flashy: just reliable, elegant weapons that she’s had years of experience with. Her strategy is easy to figure out: focus on moving in as quickly as she can, and firing shots to cut off Hime’s movement when she can’t. Simple in concept, more difficult in practice. She knows from experience that Hime is fantastic at controlling space, herding you to where she wants you to be and cutting off your advance. She’s less adept at dealing with close range pressure, or getting you away from her if you manage to close in – her chains travel too slowly, too linearly, and she can’t throw out clusters of bullets if they’ll hit herself as well.

“Ready when you are,” she calls, and takes out her blade; with but a touch, the well-worn technology springs to life, illuminating her in soft magenta. A warm and familiar light.

“Then, begin!”

Her muscles tighten, her heartbeat quickens; the colours of the fireworks below seem to dilute as she focuses herself solely on Hime. She blinks, and in the time her eyes are closed, Hime moves. She catches the tail end of the gesture, an expansive sweep of the arm, and realises that the first barrage is already coming. Despite herself, she’s surprised. They have their rituals. By long tradition, the first move is usually Suguri’s.

She surges forward in a sharp arc, like the tip of a knife whistling through the air. Hime’s bullets are the stars above her, just waiting to rain down like grapeshot from a cannon. Her eyes flicker to the barrage and back to Hime’s face. Her gut barks at her, _move!_ , and she banks up and to the left like a jagged bolt of lightning. The chain whips through the space where her face had been a half-second too late before scattering into more bullets. She soars upwards, straight through the barrage, ducking and weaving through the bullets where she can and feeling the others thump against her like hailstones before sliding harmlessly off her shields.

As soon as her dash peaks she begins her descent, soaring toward Hime in a ragged zigzag, drawing stitches in the sky. She needs time to think. This isn’t the way that it goes. She shoots first, not Hime. She’s always so much more reluctant to use her chains, and they’re never quite so fast. Something is different. She pulls out her rifle, hands steady. Squeezes the trigger as if she’s shaking hands with an old friend, lets the kickback slow her down. Hime dodges the shots gracefully, effortlessly, beautifully. With a sweep of the blonde girl’s hand another chain is flying, still too fast, and she has to kick into a long swooping fall to avoid it.

Away from Back at roughly the same height as Hime, she presses closer, peppering shots from her rifle into the night sky. They won’t hit. They can’t hit. Hime is too good for that, too fine a dancer. But they represent a space into which her opponent cannot move. It’s a tactic she’s begun to embrace more and more when she spars with Sora. The ex-soldier is something of a genius, a nightmare with speed and power in equal measure. The way to beat power, she has learned, is with control – of your opponent, and of yourself.

She jinks forward in strange and unpredictable intervals, expecting Hime to fall back. Close combat isn’t where the goddess shines; they often joke about how she prefers to be admired from afar. But instead she rushes forward, scattering bullets as she goes, her mouth closed in a tight smile. _I’m coming to meet you,_ her face says. _I shan’t back down, even for you._

The distance closes; the heat of a melee draws in. For all her misgivings, she grits her teeth, dip at the last second and takes the first sweeping slice with her sabre. She aims high at the neck to force Hime downwards, away from the white-hot magenta blur of her blade. As soon as the first strike is done she darts around and to the back, attacking again from on high, and then to the front, faster and faster until it feels like she’s attacking from every angle all at once, a storm of heat and violence.

It isn’t enough, of course. Most of Suguri’s opponents will only ever see her attack like this a single time. There’s no way to prepare themselves for how fast, how unpredictable, how _efficient_ she is at close range. By the time they know what’s going on, the fight is lost. But Hime _has_ seen it, time and time again, and is more than prepared. She turns her body and lets the worst of the strikes roll off her, her shield crackling, dodging what she can. She can’t dodge all of them. Truth be told, she probably can’t even dodge enough of them. But it gives her time, time she uses to calmly look for an opening.

As Suguri comes in close for another pass, she finds her opportunity. She whips out a chain that grazes across Suguri’s temple before scattering into bullets, forcing the silver-haired girl downwards. Smiling, she darts backwards and away, and as she does a storm of bullets hammers down on Suguri’s position. They hit her squarely this time, less like hail and more like withering punches to the gut. For a moment, she’s breathless. Impressed. That moment is enough time for Hime to dart away again, establish a range more comfortable for her.

Suguri bites her lip, shakes her head. She built up too much heat when she was attacking, and her shields couldn’t cool down before the barrage. She’s on the back foot, and she knows it. A protracted fight will be her loss – Hime is too good at corralling her into the path of bullets, and eventually the wear will add up. The only way to win is the riskiest.

As quickly as she can, she bursts forwards, feeling the heat rise in her shielding again. Hime fires off another chain, heading straight for her, no doubt expecting her to take a wide arc to avoid it; instead, she barrel rolls to the left and races alongside its length. The links closest to Hime begin to scatter into bullets as she approaches but she carries on, trusting her shields and her momentum to divert the energy away. She reaches deep, flicks the safety off her sabre, and sweeps her hand in one magnificent slice, the blade ragged with force, a majestic crescent moon bigger than either of them that sweeps directly into Hime’s side.

Even in the fury of her hyper attack, Suguri is stunned. Hime didn’t even try to dodge, just turned her body to let some of the force roll off her. The shield of the goddess crackles ominously, straining to deal with all the energy, all the force. _It won’t hold_ , Suguri thinks. _Is she conceding?_ It can’t be right. Hime enjoys their dances too much, and keeps them going for as long as she can. Something is wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. The fight has been off from the start, and she doesn’t know why –

As the momentum of the follow-through carries her forward, she feels something snag her wrist like a vice and jerk her back. She has a fraction of a second to see that it’s Hime’s hand, before her arm twists and Hime’s other hand comes down on her wrist like a hammer. Her fingers open of their own accord and her sword tumbles from her grip into the sky below; like that, quietly and efficiently, she’s disarmed. Hime jerks her closer again, for – what? A punch, a slap, a headbutt –

Their lips touch.

At first, she thinks it’s a mistake. Things like that happen in the battlefield. But not usually so gently, or so warmly. In just a moment, Hime will pull back and apologise, and things will be normal. But then she feels a hand at her back, pulling her closer, and all other thoughts vanish from her mind. Hime’s lips, Hime – so soft. So warm. How many thousands of years has it been since her heart beat like this? She finds herself pressing even closer, so their noses bump together and their bodies fit like pieces of a puzzle. Her breathing is ragged, and her cheeks are burning. The bruises of the fight seem very far away, as though she got them decades ago instead of seconds. It feels like something is waking up inside her, some need that has been pushed to the side and forgotten until this moment, and in Hime too –

Their lips part at last, and she hears Hime breathe deeply, almost gasping, as though she’s been suffocating all the way until now and now she’s finally been given air. She’s blushing furiously, but there is a wide smile on her face, half-joy and half-mischief, as if she might come back for another kiss right away.

“Ufufufu,” she laughs, and it is nervous and giggly but somehow _so_ satisfied, the cat that got the cream. “It seems I got carried away and did something _outrageous_.”

Suguri can’t speak. Half-words form and drop from her mouth, all from different sentences, different feelings. She feels like there is an electric current passing through her. Like she’s waking up.

“Well, that last stunt nearly exhausted my shield reserves, so we can call this my loss,” the goddess purrs, knowing full well that nothing could be further from the truth. “Are you going to take me home right away, or would you prefer to enjoy the moonlight a little more?”

“Y… You planned it.”

“Oh, a kiss at the turn of the year above a romantic fireworks display? I might have engineered it a little,” Hime concedes, dropping one eyelid in wink. “I was rather hoping you might do it, but… well. It’s not so bad for a lady to take the lead once in a while.”

Again, words fail Suguri. Her brain is doing too many things at once right now. There are too many words and thoughts and emotions. She’s rerunning memories of the last few minutes, examining them, indulging in them. _Oh, sweet Planet Earth._ She comes back to herself when she feels Hime’s hand slip into hers, and Hime’s arm curl around her waist.

“Let’s get you home, shall we?” Hime says, her lips at Suguri’s ear. “I’ll make you some nice cocoa, and you can sleep on things. See tonight as… an invitation, so to speak. I shan’t hold it against you if you decline.”

She gives Suguri’s hand a squeeze, and begins to move. Still half-embracing her. Her face is so close. All of a sudden Suguri’s mouth springs to life, scrabbling over the bits and fragments of words she’s trying to assemble.

“H-Hime!” she says, so loudly, so sharply that it feels like the name is being pulled from some place deep down inside her. “C.. C-can we, ah… d… d-do more?”

For a second, Hime makes a show of pausing, puts a finger to her chin. She’s teasing. She _has_ to be, Suguri thinks, she can’t just kiss her once and then it’s done forever, it isn’t fair to wake up all these feelings and these needs and just leave them there –

“More kissing? Well…I _did_ tell you I was starting this year as I meant to go on, did I not?” she says, and her voice is as soft and smooth as silk. “Let’s talk about it when we get home, shall we? Or not talk, as the case may be.”

Her laughter is sparkling, dazzling. Far below them, the people of the town are packing up their firework equipment, laughing and eating, none the wiser as to what has happened above them. The fireworks for this year are over.

But the fireworks in Suguri’s heart won’t die down for a long time yet.


	31. Summer Home

I leave my baggage at the door, and roll my aching shoulders as I stalk into the house. It’s been a long flight. It’s always a long flight, but this year it felt longer As a rule I travel light – it isn’t like I can carry a suitcase, so I make do with what I can fit in a backpack. But I thought it would be a good idea to wear my arms this time, and I didn’t realise how heavy they were, or how much extra air resistance they’d cause.

Or maybe the flight just felt long because I didn’t want to make it.

My first port of call is the living room, where there stands an old, high-backed armchair, cushioned in red velvet. It’s one of the few pieces of furniture I brought back to this place, and I only took it because it was sturdy. It’s a nice place to sit for a few minutes after the flight, and I fall into it almost out of habit. I rest my prosthetics on the arms, decide it feels strange, and put my hands back in my lap. For a few minutes (hours? Time is difficult to keep track of sometimes), I sit.

This is my summer home, for want of a better word. It isn’t really a home; a home is a place you’ve decided to live. This is the place I’ve decided to die. I stumbled across it one day in my travels, and it spoke to me on some level – the way the stone was so out of place next to the beach, the ruined portico at the entrance, the way all the windows faced the setting sun. It was a wreck when I found it, abandoned and unloved; each year I add something, and each year another part of the house threatens to crumble away. I feel like that’s been true of myself as well, for a very long time – constantly treading water.

Maybe it’s strange to have picked out your deathbed. But I’ve had a lot of time to think about it, and to set my affairs in order. Long enough for my affairs to fall out of order, and for me to have to chase them again. I’m not immortal. I won’t live forever, and I’m not sure I want to. It’s hard to tell how long I’ve got left. My body stays the same, more or less. But whenever the time comes, I want this to be the place I come to rest.

The minutes pass, and so does my tiredness. There’s work to be done, and I can’t relax when I have an objective in mind, no matter how much I’d like to. This year, I’m going to add more than one thing, fix more than one problem. That’s the reason I set out in spring instead of summer, and brought my arms with me, even though they’re heavy. I won’t fix everything – I feel that would change the very heart of this place – but I want to make it more liveable.

My first job is to make a list, an inventory of what needs fixing that I can narrow down to whatever’s plausible in the time I have. Item number one is the wallpaper and the plastering. Just the walls, in general. A long time ago, there was a mix of white stucco walling and some kind of rich purple wallpapering, but the stucco is cracked now, and the wallpaper peeling into flakes that fall like dead leaves to the polished floorboards. I’ll have to get a steamer from somewhere, and a chisel, and take off the entire surface little by little. That might keep me busy for a few weeks by itself. I’ll probably just put new stucco over top; I like the idea of a surface that can be painted, and it might be nice to hire an artist and have them put some kind of mural on one of the walls.

The kitchen needs re-tiling, too, and I have to check the stock of preserved food. Some of it is probably beyond saving now, and if I’m honest, most of the cans are full of things I used to like and don’t any more; my body might change little, but my sense of taste continues to drift.

I kick off my shoes, take out a notepad from an old, dusty end-table and start to scribble down a few ideas. I think of the kinds of foods Sora might like to eat, and Hime; from what I can tell, Suguri isn’t fussy. I’ll invite them here when it’s less of a state. I’ve never brought anybody to visit before. I never really intended to live here. But Sora needs to see this house, and what lies beyond it.

Sora, Sora, Sora. I think of Sora a lot nowadays – probably too much, although it’s not like I have all that much else to think about. For thousands of years, she was a distant memory. A face I could never forget. I still remember the way her eyes looked when we talked after her battle, and a brief flash of shock and sorrow when I was blasted from behind. The girl I know today is rounder and fuller as a person than the one I met on the battlefield, and I’ve been around to see that growth. I once heard a person say that ‘blessing’ is what you call a pain in the neck you couldn’t do without, and I suppose Sora falls into that category.

I told her I’d be leaving a few days in advance. It was an impromptu decision. She looked at me with those wide green eyes, and I thought for a moment she looked… lonely, I suppose. I’m jealous of those eyes. The world is still a place of wonder for her; there are still things she has not seen, and cannot yet imagine. I want to see her reaction when she does see them. That said, she has a talent for surprising me, even though I’ve lived for so long.

“Are you going to sunbathe naked?” was the first question she asked.

“Quit imagining weird things.”

“It’s not weird. I like to imagine you relaxing. Your back is straight all the time.”

“Then imagine me relaxing with clothes on.”

“But then you’d get tan lines.”

Even days later, it makes me smile. She isn’t wrong, oddly enough – I usually take some time to top up my tan whenever I visit my summer house, and the beach is private so there’s nobody to see me. I don’t like my complexion when I’m pale. It reminds me of the moment I first looked in the mirror after I came off the operating table – after they took my arms. But I always wonder how she reaches her conclusions, and why she reaches them at the moments she does. She must have some kind of intuition, or her head must be a very mysterious place.

When I’m finished, I look my list up and down. I’m more or less happy with it, although it’s a few months’ worth of work, and I only really intend to spend a month or two here. There’s one thing on my list which isn’t about the house itself, and it’s by far the most important thing on there. But it’ll wait until I’ve had a glass of wine. Tucked away in a quiet, dark corner of the house is a wine-rack I brought myself. I usually buy a bottle or two each year and squirrel it away there. Most of it isn’t exactly the kind of wine that ageing improves; I make it a rule not to buy anything too good. All I want is something I can take out and drink a glass of on the beach as I watch the sunset. I don’t want to sit here in this half-abandoned place, drinking entire bottles by myself. I’ve done that kind of thing before, and nothing good comes of it.

I dither a little as I pick my drink, before going for a sweet, fruity white. I used to prefer reds, but lately I find them a little too heavy. I want something brighter, more refreshing. I pour a glass, stop up the bottle (so much easier with fingers and thumbs) and set out onto the beach to enjoy the sound of the ocean. It’s too late today to get started on anything. Before long, the sea and the sky begin to lull me towards an easy sleep.

* * *

 

“Sorry. I’ll be intruding.”

Nobody answers, of course. I smile; the sun is beaming down through the canopy, warming my skin. I’m prepared for a good day’s work.

This place, this shaded grove, is the real reason I visit my summer house each year. This is a man-made place of nature, an open space; I planted these trees many moons ago, and built the latticed pergola on which the vines grow overhead. I trim them back every year so the sun can shine through them and reach the ground, and that’s one of my jobs for today. The other is to look along the headstones for any signs of damage, and clean the ones that need it.

This is the graveyard that I built, for all those soldiers fallen in the Great War.

There’s no way I could have gravestones for them all. Not even a fraction. There were simply too many that died in the line of duty: too many people who did what their country asked them to do, and did it until the bitter end. Because they believed in it. Because they thought it would protect their families. Because they had no other choice. Many reasons. The number who died is lost to time.

But in my travels, I come across records of them – old, fragmented data disks with records of men and women killed in such-and-such a skirmish. Sometimes even dog tags, ancient and tarnished but still at least recognisable as relics of the war. For each set of dog tags, I make a grave and bury them; each name, I have carved on a great marble slab that rests beyond the plots. It’s been a few decades since I found any, but the work continues. I collect things, and this is a collection that will never be complete.

One day – not soon, but one day in the far future – I’ll pick out a plot for myself here. I don’t know quite where it’ll be. Not in the middle, certainly. Maybe near the edges, but far enough in that the vines are thinner and there’s a little sun. I think it’s important for these graves to see the sky that became blue, to be cradled by this Earth that was healed.

And I think it’s important that, when the house is presentable and everything is in order, I invite Sora here. She needs to know that this place exists, what it is and what it stands for. That even if it’s only a handful of the people who died, they’re being remembered. I hope that, whenever the time comes and I can’t do it anymore, she’ll walk along these graves from time to time and make sure they don’t become a ruin.

Until then, it’d be nice to relax by the sea together. The sands of this beach are always clean – something I probably have Suguri and her world regeneration to thank for, in hindsight. The heat is fine and dry, never clingy. It’s a good place. …That means I’d have to go and shop for a swimsuit, and learn how to do all the straps and clips. Ugh. Maybe next year.

The sun slowly shifts overhead, and the hours pass. As much as they’re sometimes inconvenient, the new arms do make the work much lighter. By the time I’m done, I’ve got a note of what stones need cleaning and which ones are okay until next year, I’ve thinned the ivy overhead and trimmed back the weeds, and quietly read out the names on the monument as a way of honouring them. I’ve noticed there’s more butterflies hanging around than last year, and more flowers are creeping in through the shadows of the trees at the perimeter. It’s an irony, I suppose, that this graveyard is teeming with life, and the house is as still as the grave.

…Well, that’s what I came here to fix, I guess. Come to think of it, I should probably check that the phone line still works. I promised to call from time to time, and I’ve gotten too used to having people to talk to all the time. I set down my tools and amble back to the house.

After a little fiddling with the telephone wires, I manage to connect the old home phone up. I get halfway through dialing Suguri’s number before thinking a second, putting the phone back on the hook, and then dialing the number for my apartment.

“ _Hello? We don’t want any,”_ a sleepy voice mumbles after a few rings.

“Sora? It’s me.”

“ _Oh! Major, Nath’s calling. Say hi.”_ There’s five seconds of silence as, halfway across the world, Sora holds up the phone to the cat and the cat says absolutely nothing. “ _He used up all his meows earlier. It’s fine. Did you make the flight okay?”_

I roll my eyes. “If I crashed into a fighter jet, the fighter jet would lose. I made the flight okay.”

“ _Good. Don’t let light aircraft bully you. That’s what Suguri always says.”_

I smile, but instead of inquiring about Suguri’s contentious relationship with the aviation industry, I decide to move the conversation along. “While I did say you could use my apartment while I was gone, I didn’t expect you to be there the first day.”

“ _I’m looking after the cat.”_ There’s another pause, and I can hear purring faintly from over the phone. _“Also, I’m giving Suguri and Hime some time alone. They keep smooching when they think I won’t notice it._ ”

Something between a snort and a splutter forces its way out of me, but I cover the mouthpiece before she can hear it. _“_ A _…_ ha. Well. I didn’t… know they had that kind of relationship.”

“ _They’re bad at being sneaky. It’s very funny,_ ” Sora replies, as seriously as ever.

“Sounds like the height of comedy.”

“ _Yes._ ”

I lean back against the stucco, cradling the phone against my ear. The wall is warm against my back. I wasn’t expecting talking on the phone to be so relaxing. “Well, anyway. I’ll have to get the house fixed up a bit, but maybe next month you can come over and visit. There’s a beach.”

“ _Do you have a swimsuit?”_

“…No.”

“ _Lewd.”_

“Shut up. Do you have one?”

“ _No.”_

“Well, there you go then.”

“ _I’ll get one. Hime says they went to the beach last year and they got kicked out for making a mess. It was lots of fun.”_

I spy an opportunity, and decide to take a gamble on it. “Get me one too, then. You’re good at that kind of thing. You guessed my sizes straight away last time.”

“ _Okay. I’ll pick out something cute.”_

“Nothing too risqué, please. I’ll pay you back next time I see you.”

“ _Roger._ ”

There’s a lull, and it feels like the right time to end the call. Neither of us are the type for long phone conversations. Leave that to Hime. “Well, I’ll leave you to it. Stroke the cat for me, and try not to make a mess. I’ll tell you when you can come over.”

“ _Mm. Call again soon, okay?”_

“Okay.”

Unceremoniously, she hangs up. Well, that’s fine. No sense in long goodbyes. I put the phone back on the cradle, and start thinking about what to do next. There’s plenty of sanding that needs to be done, but to be honest, I just want to take a shower and lie on the beach for a while. I wasn’t planning to invite her over that soon, and now I’ve put a time limit on my sunbathing. Oh well.

When I’m ready I step out onto the sand, sunlight beating down on bare skin – the way it was meant to be felt. As I set down my towel and a bucket of ice to keep my wine in, I feel happier in this place than I have in years. Without realising it, I had grown to dread this journey – dread this lonely and abandoned house. But now it feels like there’s some potential to it. Just like my graveyard is full of life, maybe I can fill that house with laughter. Maybe I should have done it a long time ago. For now, it is a place of peace, and I lie down to start a silent communion – between myself, the sand, and the sky.


	32. Poppomikki Sunshine (I)

There was simply no way around it: Sora had run out of clothes.

To Hime’s surprise and Suguri’s mild envy, it seemed that Sora had not _quite_ been done with the whole business of growing when she was sent off to war and knocked into a ten thousand year coma. Whatever had kept her fed for those ten thousand years – Suguri had found the burnt out remains of a life-support capsule nearby, although it seemed to have suffered the brunt of Sora’s anger when she awoke to a steel-grey sky – it had been giving her just enough nutrients to live and no more than that. When she first came to them, Hime was fond of remarking, you could have flossed your teeth with her; and yet, as both Suguri and herself were waifish in construction themselves, they had just assumed it was her natural weight and thought nothing more of it.

As it turned out, they were wrong. Quite wrong. In fact, the capsule had not even maintained her optimum battle weight, which was set quite a bit below what they would consider an optimum living weight. Now, powered by frequent napping, light exercise, and as much bacon and eggs as Hime was willing to cook, the ex-soldier had picked up right where she left off in the growth department – and it seemed that all three of them had been caught off-guard by it.

“The zip broke,” she said as she presented Hime with her last jacket. It was the latest in a long line of casualties – leggings that were inches too short and littered with holes, shoes that pinched at the sides, tops that were accustomed to a less voluminous bust. She was down to the bare essentials, and even those were threatening to give out. Hime was at her wits’ end – she kept fixing things, only to have them break again a day later. She was getting rather better with a needle and thread than she had ever hoped to be.

“We _must_ go out and get her some more clothes tomorrow,” Hime said that evening. “She can’t sit around the house in her underwear all day.”

Suguri, who had happily sat around the house in her underwear when she was a ‘bachelor’, and who was almost certain that Hime would cheerfully do the same if she could get away with it, was a little less concerned but still conceded the point. She had enough trouble convincing one blonde girl to keep her clothes on, and she didn’t need another to contend with.

“For now,” she said, hesitating only the tiniest bit, “let’s go and see if I have any spare clothes that will fit her.”

Hime’s face lit up. Suguri’s closet was a mysterious and dangerous place; no living human had ever managed to get past the curtain of identical windbreakers to where the true treasures of her world-saving wardrobe lay. Given Suguri’s… eclectic tendencies with furniture and cutlery, there were bound to be some well-worn oddments and relics of times gone past. It took her only seconds to find something that caught her fancy.

“Suguri! You absolutely must change into this one,” she said, holding up a… something that she couldn’t quite define, but which was soft mauve with ruffles and she loved it immediately. “It’s so poofy. I’ve never thought of you in poofy clothes before! One twirl is all I ask. Just one little twirl, and I won’t ask you to try on anything else.”

Suguri sighed. “No. We’re looking for clothes for Sora, not me. Put that down and help me look.”

“Just a twirl, Suguri,” Hime continued, her eyes glittering. “Do you know how much my life would be improved by twirling? You would be making me the happiest I’ve been in _hours_.”

“‘Hours’ isn’t a very long time.”

“Well, we _did_ kiss after dinner, you know. Please give me a twirl?”

“I’ll give you a twirl,” Suguri replied sternly, “when you’ve earned a twirl.”

Hime smiled. “I can accept those terms. And how would I go about earning a twirl, hm? What about a sensual massage, or perhaps I could–”

“Start by looking in the boxes. I’m sure I had some oversized t-shirts packed away,” Suguri replied, not quite as definitively as she would have liked. “If we can get her a full outfit for tomorrow, you can pick out two things for me to try on.”

It was a deal she didn’t offer lightly, but she was sure – _almost_ sure – she didn’t actually own anything that would make her feel dangerously exposed if Hime asked her to wear it, and she had previously established with Hime that ‘nothing’ did not count as either a thing or an article of clothing. She was safe, probably, and Hime had begun to paw pensively through the cardboard boxes, just as planned.

After a few minutes of productive searching, Suguri finally pulled out a pair of leggings that hadn’t been attacked by moths. She owned multiple pairs of leggings, and they were all too big for her; fundamentally, she didn’t quite understand any form of leg accessory that wasn’t a thigh-high. It was knowledge she had never needed. Thigh-highs were simply the superior choice in every eventuality, although she had stockpiled some alternatives in case something shifted in the moons. Sora would almost certainly know how they worked, and they would almost certainly fit her. That was victory, as Suguri knew and understood it.

“Oh! I found one in large!” Hime called, after another five minutes of rummaging through clothes (and earmarking ones for Suguri to model for her later). “And it doesn’t smell more than a decade old.”

It was, she thought privately, a very strange item for Suguri to own. It was in large, for one thing, and that did not square with her adorable, pocket-sized friend. For another, it was pink. Very pink. Absolutely, undeniably the pinkest shirt she had ever seen, in the hottest shade. It was a shirt you would hesitate to look at without sunglasses, and the sunglasses would have to be rose-tinted at that. She couldn’t imagine Sora actually wearing it – Sora didn’t seem to her to be a very pink kind of person – but seeing it on Suguri would be unthinkable. Unpinkable, even.

She was so taken aback by the majestic pinkness of it that she almost didn’t spot the logo splashed across the front, in a font that was more stylish than readable. It took her a moment to puzzle out the words, and when she had, they meant just as little to her as when she started. She turned to show the shirt to Suguri, who quite understandably reacted as though she had shone a floodlight in her face.

“What,” she asked curiously, “is ‘Poppomikki Sunshine?’”

Suguri let out a long, tired sigh, and scratched the back of her head. “We’d better go downstairs.”

* * *

 

The sound of Suguri’s old and trusty laptop starting up was to Hime as the dinner bell was to Pavlov’s dogs; as soon as she heard it, her body braced for the dopamine rush that came from watching videos of cats. Her shoulders went slack, her muscles loosened, and altogether she became pre-emptively soft and pliable, all the better for snuggling on a loveseat with. She was mildly disappointed when Suguri did not immediately click on the grand archive of funny pet videos to which they had become so accustomed, but the feeling of peace was so powerful that she couldn’t bring herself to worry about it.

Across the room, Sora had wriggled out of her sleeping bag and into her new clothes. She had become a world-class wriggler in the past few months, and the transition was smooth and easy. The top that would have swamped Suguri was still too big for her, but the leggings seemed at least serviceable. She still hoped she could persuade Hime to fix her jacket, or at least have a replica made in a better size. It was her favourite, and she had begun to replace all the wartime memories it held for her with new, happy memories, full of fun and snacks. Mostly snacks.

“Poppomikki Sunshine,” Suguri explained as she waited for the video hosting service to load, “is a pop idol I used to watch. I wanted to see one of her live shows, but never went. So I bought a shirt instead.”

“A shirt three sizes too big for you?”

“They only did medium and large, okay? I thought I could use it as pyjamas. It didn’t look so bright in the preview.”

Hime smiled. If it had looked that bright in the preview, nobody would have bought it. “Still… a pop idol? I didn’t think that would be your taste in music. I was imagining… oh, I don’t know. Something more electronic.”

“Everybody thinks that. But pop idols aren’t my favourite. They’re just… always there, you know? The genres I like keep dying out and coming back in worse forms a hundred years later, but pop idols always come back exactly the same.”

“It’s much less cute when you explain it like that.”

“I’m not a cute fanatic. Leave that to Saki,” Suguri grumbled. “Anyway, Poppomikki caught my eye because she seemed more mature than a lot of other pop idols. …That’s why, when people started shortening her name to PMS, she ended up taking a long career break.”

Hime snorted. “Oh, my. Well, I do feel sorry for her, but… she did walk into it, didn’t she?”

“She came back about three years ago. That was when I bought that shirt. From what I can tell, her sound hasn’t changed at all,” Suguri said, shrugging. “This footage from one of her live performances last month, I think.”

It wasn’t an official video. Official cameramen didn’t produce footage like that without being very, very drunk, and they definitely didn’t use bargain basement camcorders, or sit at the very back of the arena. In the video, the stage looked like a very vague blur, and the singer was barely more than a smudge. A smudge that kept moving, because whoever had the camcorder had very shaky hands. But the audio quality seemed fair enough; beyond the chatter of the crowd, Hime could just about pick up the singer making her pre-set speeches.

“ _It’s great to be here with you all! I’d love to stop and say hello, but instead, I’m gonna hit you with my first song right away! Everybody enjoy the concert, and remember: Love! And! Peace!”_

The last three words were echoed by the crowd in a great roar before the music started. It was sparkly synthesisers, jaunty piano tracks and a bouncy baseline, the kind of music that was very light on the brain but fun enough to listen to. The singer, smudgey as she was, seemed to be full of energy on stage, zipping through her dance routine in full motion. Although she certainly seemed older than most pop idols Hime had heard of, and her voice was a little huskier, she seemed to be having an absolute ball.

“This isn’t bad,” she whispered, snuggling a little closer to Suguri on the loveseat. It wasn’t really danceable. She preferred music that matched her sweeping, graceful movements for that. But it was at least fun, and she held fun as a very high priority in life.

“Mm. There’s something that makes her stand out,” Suguri agreed with a nod.

“Sham,” Sora said.

How Sora had managed to sneak up to them while wearing a shirt that lit her up like a camping flare was a very valid question. But it was the strange, blunt tone in her voice that made Hime sit up and take notice. She was never exactly loquacious, but there was always something gentle in the way that she spoke, and it wasn’t there now. There was no way she could be _that_ annoyed at pop music, was there? She threw a glance in Suguri’s direction, before trying to mollify her somewhat. “Well, it’s a little bit over-produced, but I don’t think it’s fair to call it a–”

“No! It’s Sham,” Sora interrupted. She wasn’t shouting. Not yet. Even when she was angry, she was quiet in the same way a panther is quiet until the moment it strikes. But it might have been the loudest she’d spoken since they first met her, when she was lashing out at the world with all her might. “I knew her. I fought her. I can tell.”

Suguri lowered her chin, thinking deeply. “Sham. Sham… I remember seeing the name in records of the Great War.”

“She gave me my combat training, and tried to bring me back when I defected. We fought, and she lost. That was the last time I saw her.” Sora shook her head, waving away memories with a sweep of her shaggy hair. “I need to speak with her.”

Hime frowned, and steeled her nerve. This was the part she didn’t like – the part that Suguri, for all her strengths, just couldn’t do. She curled her hand around Suguri’s, and took a deep breath. “Sora… It’s been ten thousand years. I’m not saying that you’re wrong, but… it’s awfully unlikely that this pop idol is one of your old comrades, isn’t it? You can’t even see her face in the video.”

Suguri gave her hand a squeeze. It was difficult to dampen Sora’s excitement – the sense of purpose that she had been lacking so far, that seemed to roll off her in waves now. But false hope and high expectations were an awful combination. She needed something, someone, to be reasonable, or else a bad result might break her heart. Or worse – she’d be looking for the faces of people she knew in crowds for as long as she lived.

“I met Nath _on the street_ ,” she replied, pointedly. “I know it’s her. I would know her anywhere. In the video, her hair is longer on one side. She has a burn scar under that. She speaks the same way, and her voice is just right. It _has_ to be Sham.” She shook her head again, balled her hands into tight, angry fists. “I don’t care what you say. I’m going.”

For a moment, the room was still, the silence broken only by the tinny laptop speakers. They had known Sora was stubborn, and a little headstrong; how could she not be, after deciding to face two armies by herself for the sake of peace? But it was the first time it had brought them into conflict with her. The first time it wasn’t just a minor thing that lurked in the background, something that could be laughed off.

“Silly girl,” Hime replied finally, so lightly that it didn’t sting. Her words were on tiptoes, on eggshells. “Did anybody tell you not to? Of course, we’re going to support you on this. You’re our family, after all. Besides, if you never checked you would never know for sure, would you? I’m just saying that you should be prepared for the possibility that it’s not her.”

Sora’s brow furrowed, and her mouth curled into a frown. “Oh. …Sorry. I jumped to the wrong conclusion.”

“We’re not on different sides. There’s no ‘you against us’. Just ‘us’,” Suguri said, bringing up another tab on her browser. “Let me see if I can get tickets. We could barge into a concert, but it wouldn’t be a good first impression.”

“No autographs for gatecrashers,” Hime winked, and nudged Suguri with her elbow.

“And no back-stage pass, either. She usually does a meet and greet with fans backstage after each concert… that’d be the best time,” Suguri murmured. “Next concert is in two weeks. I’ll have to go for aftermarket tickets, but we should be able to get in.”

“See? You’re in good hands. Suguri happens to be her number one fan.”

“Hush.” She tilted her head to look at Sora, and although her red eyes were as calm as they always were, there was warmth in them as well. “Can you wait that long? Two weeks?”

It was a full five seconds before she finally nodded. “…Mn. It’ll give me chance to think about what I want to say. I beat her up pretty bad last time… I hope she isn’t mad.”

“If she can stay mad at you for ten thousand years, then she has a rare talent. I can barely stay mad at you for half an hour,” Hime remarked.

“And I can get some new clothes. I don’t want to look scruffy.”

“You and Suguri _always_ look scruffy. It’s charming, in its own way, she said affectionately. “My two little scruffpots.”

“…I’m bigger than you, though.”

Hime’s grin became sly. “Oh, so you are. Well, then, ‘Big Sis’, I’ll let you take the bins out from now on. You’re bigger and stronger, after all.”

“…You’re too cheeky,” Sora said, slowly shaking her head. The yawn was in her voice before it hit her body; it was high time for a nap, and she knew it. “Thank you for looking for tickets, Suguri.”

Suguri gave her a half-smile. “Don’t worry about it. I haven’t been to a concert for a long time. It’s a good opportunity.”

“Don’t _I_ get a thank you?” Hime asked.

“…You didn’t do anything, though.”

“I found that t-shirt you’re wearing.”

Sora looked down at her shirt, which was less hot pink than molten-core-of-the-sun pink, and thought that losing such a shirt would be infinitely more difficult than finding it. But a thank you is easy to find and painless to give, so she thanks Hime with a nod of the head and a formless sound before returning to the warmth and comfort of her sleeping bag.

A quiet hour passed with Suguri typing away at the computer, sending enquiries and steadfastly resisting the temptation to watch cat videos with Hime, who was no longer sat beside her on the loveseat and had instead more or less draped herself across Suguri’s lap. Sora had retreated to her regular napping position, but her eyes remained open and alert, thoughts ticking across her brain. Finally, Suguri sighed and stretched her shoulders.

“Sora? I’m going to leave the computer on, in case you want to listen to some of her other songs. Don’t stay up too late,” she said. “Hime, are you still awake?”

“…If I say no, will you carry me up to bed?”

“I’d consider it.”

“Then no. I am sleeping very deeply and will be for the foreseeable future.”

“Alright.”

It was a little odd to see Suguri scoop up a girl who was larger than she was, but Suguri was stronger than the average bear, and Hime was probably was probably using some level of flight to help her cheat a little bit. With one last nod to Sora, they disappeared up the stairs. Slowly, she began to wriggle her way across the floor to the computer.

When they came down in the morning, there were soft, dark circles under her eyes. But she knew the entire first album off by heart.


	33. Poppomikki Sunshine (II)

Sora was visibly wavering. She couldn’t help it. On one hand, she had an objective: make her way through a crowd of dedicated Poppomikki Sunshine fans so she could stand right at the stage and get the best view of the starlet who might be Sham. On the other hand, there was a man selling glowsticks at the entrance to the venue, and it had apparently piqued her curiosity. It had also piqued Hime’s curiosity, and the ex-ship guardian was trying to explain to Sora exactly what a glowstick was.

“So, you bend it, and it activates the liquid inside and it produces light.”

“So it’s like an emergency flare?”

“Well, no. It doesn’t produce that much light. Just enough to glow for a while.”

“Then what’s the point?”

Even from where she was standing Suguri could pick out Hime rolling her eyes. Sora, they had both observed, had a very strange worldview; on one hand, she was curious about anything and everything. On the other hand, she had spent many years in the ‘loving’ care of the military during the greatest war mankind had ever seen or was likely to see, and had adopted some of the more utilitarian outlooks. She seemed convinced that everything had to have a use, a purpose, and tended to interpret new things in terms of what they might be _for_ , rather than what they actually were.

“Well… The point is that they also don’t get nearly so hot as a flare. So you can hold them in your hand and wave them about.”

“So… you use them to signal aircraft?”

“No, they aren’t bright enough for that.”

“Then what’s the point?”

“The point,” Hime said, and the briskness of the word hinted that she was becoming impatient, “is that it’s very aesthetically pleasing to see the light moving around in a darkened room. They’re very popular at raves, so I’m told.”

Which, Suguri thought, was probably why the salesman had such a long face. There weren’t quite so many ravers at a concert for a bright, cheerful, energetic pop idol. He should have been selling bottles of water, she thought; it was a hot day, and soon they were going to be pressed into a crowd of almost a thousand other hot, sweaty people. She would definitely have paid for some hydration on a day like today, but in this kind of sunshine, a glowstick was just as useless as Sora seemed to think they were.

“Raving… That’s a dance? How do you do it?” Sora asked.

“Here, I’ll show you. Excuse me!” Hime called, turning to the seller and reaching for her purse. “Do you have the ones you can wear as necklaces? I’ll take three – no, five.”

Suguri could swear that there was a tear in the seller’s eye when he handed over the merchandise and took his payment. He was definitely looking at Sora with some form of gratitude, and Hime was though she were the actual saviour of the world.

“So, usually there’s a very strong, rhythmic backbeat at a rave. Like, unst unst unst, yes? So, in time with that, you put your hands in the air – as if you were trying to push up an invisible ceiling,” Hime explained, snapping the glowstick necklace and putting it around her neck. “Here. Unst, unst, unst!”

She demonstrated, taking her rainbow coloured wings out and back in again on every beat. Sora looked about as mystified as she had before, but this time she at least had some mystified passers-by for company. Hime seemed to be having fun, though, which to Suguri felt like the main thing.

“Wow,” Sora said, after Hime’s single-woman, twenty-second rave came to a halt. “That’s hardly dancing at all.”

“Yes, but that doesn’t mean you can disrespect raving. It’s an expression of the primal desire to dance, even when you don’t know any forms, and for that I applaud it,” Hime said, tucking the rest of the glowsticks into her bag. “Well, then. Shall we go off and stake our claim?”

Sora’s focus narrowed almost palpably to a laser point. Glowsticks had been interesting. Raving was interesting. But she was here to see Sham, and to see Sham she had to be close to the stage. There were hundreds of people between her and the stage, and she was going to move _all_ of them if she had to. She wondered what she would do if they fought back. She wasn’t really dressed for battle. They had gone out in the week and gotten her a powder-blue blouse and a skirt long enough to swoosh around by her ankles, which wasn’t the most effective clothing for extreme shoulder barging. But even with a handicap, she felt sure she could achieve her objective. She rolled up her sleeves, and prepared to get to work. She was stopped by Suguri’s hand on her shoulder.

“Sora. I know you want to go to the stage right away. But try to relax and enjoy yourself, okay? That way, even if it isn’t your friend up there, it can be a nice day out,” Suguri said. “…Also, rather than barging our way through the crowd, why don’t we fly around and see if we can get a good vantage point instead?”

Sora tilted her head. It _did_ sound nice to be able to watch the show in the air, rather than sandwiched in a crowd of sweaty, smelly people. “What if they get mad at us for flying?”

“Well, how mad can they get? It’s not like we’re trying to sneak in without tickets – we have those VIP backstage passes, so we can go to the meet and greet. If anything, I should think it would help her recognise you, if it is indeed Sham. After all, there are a lot of blonde girls in the world, but how many can fly?”

“At least three, that I know of. Maybe it’s not such an exclusive club,” Suguri joked.

For the second time in ten minutes, Sora’s focus wavered. After a moment more thought, she came to her conclusion. “Nn…If we’re flying, we don’t have to hurry. Let’s get snacks.”

Hime smiled. “Oh, yes. We can’t march into battle on an empty stomach, can we?”

“Dancing is a battle?”

“Dancing is a battle, an art, and a romance. Provided you have the right partner, of course.” This was where, in a perfect world, Hime would have reached over and given Suguri a jaunty pat on the bottom. But as of yet that bottom was untouched, a sacred land; now wasn’t quite the right time to make the advance.

So she settled for a wink and a burger instead.

* * *

 

“Mikki, darling, I keep telling you: we can’t have robots as backup dancers, we just _can’t_. I’ve seen the think tank data, and I’m telling you, people just don’t like robots.”

Poppomikki Sunshine – Mikki to her friends – smiled prettily and fought the urge to tell her producer that he was lying to her. He may well have seen the think tank data, but she had _also_ seen the think tank data, and people _loved_ robots. _She_ loved robots, as a matter of fact. She thought they were cute and chunky and adorable, especially if you gave them one of those screens on the front that let them display LED smiley face emoticons. The moment they could smile at you, they went from soulless machines to friendly metal beachball buddies in five seconds flat. What she really wanted was to cover one in a fuzzy fur coat or something, so it could be plushy and huggable, but that would clog the vents and the robot would overheat, and it’d be like embracing a toaster that was still plugged in and turning bread into breakfast.

Speaking of toasters, she had been toasting for the past few hours. The hot days were always the worst; as an idol, she prided herself on her cheerful personality and boundless energy. So she couldn’t really tone down her dance routine because the thermostat demanded it without feeling like a hypocrite. Nevertheless, she absolutely _lived_ for those sweet, blissful moments just after the show where she could scurry away into a shady back room with air conditioning, peel off her sweaty clothes and put on something loose, cool and casual. (Of course, the outfit was still picked out by the wardrobe department since she’d be wearing it to fan meet and greets, but it was still a joy.)

At least, she thought to herself, she wasn’t the only one feeling the heat. Her producer had it even worse, because he seemed to think that being a producer meant he had to exist inside of a business suit at all times. His shirts were always immaculately pressed, and there was probably more starch in his trousers than in the average bowl of rice. She had made a private resolution to get him to take off his tie at least once before he died.

“Come oooooon, Dewey. I just want to try having a show with robots. Just one time. Pleaaase?” she asked. As an idol, she knew her fans; as an intelligent businesswoman in her own right, she had made sure that her producer was her biggest fan of all. He was a sucker for the long vowels and the silly pet name he said he hated but secretly enjoyed. His real name was Deuteronomy; his parents had been _convinced_ he was going to be a lawyer, and it took until he was a floppy-haired teenager with media studies as his electives for them to realise the mistake.

“It just isn’t the right time, Mikki. Tell you what, I’ll see if we can trial it for a show in next year’s tour, okay?” he replied, running his hand through his hair. His thinning hair, she noted. How old was he, anyway? Thirty? Forty? She had entirely forgotten. Time flew, and wasn’t in the habit of flying back.

“Fiiiine. But it’s a promise, okay? You know, an idol is like an elephant. Not because we’re huge and grey and wrinkly, but because we never forget, and we _especially_ don’t forget promises. Promises are forever!” she said. This was what passed for negotiations in Poppomikki Sunshine’s world, and she was more than happy to keep it that way.

With the promise of robot backup dancers successfully extracted, all that was left to do was grab a can of something pink and fizzy (raspberry, melon, it didn’t really matter – she liked to be surprised), check that the mauve shirt and pinafore the wardrobe department had put her in was immaculate, and go out to greet her fans backstage. She always loved the fan meet and greets, although she preferred the quieter, low-key ones. There was a certain pleasure in having a crowd of people chant your name, of course, but she liked to stop and chat with them all individual, give handshakes… just generally have something a little more humane, a little more intimate. Less chaotic and demanding. She hoped it would be one like that as she threaded her way through the corridors to the comfy, air-conditioned hall where her fans were waiting. She took a deep breath, counted to ten in her head, put on her brightest smile, and threw open the door.

“ _It’s Mikki!!!”_

The shouting started immediately. She sighed without losing her smile – a skill particular to her profession – and embraced the chaos. It was just going to be one of those days.

“Heeeey, everybody! Thanks so much for coming out to see me!” she shouted. The reply she got back was an indecipherable melange of excited voices. She felt as though she was a piece of paper that somebody had folded in half and put into an envelope, only the envelope was made out of pure noise.

At times like that, it was tempting to rush things – just make a quick circuit, scribble as many autographs as she needed to and retreat back to somewhere less crowded, more quiet. It was all the more tempting because nobody would blame her. But she wanted to do things properly, and so began to slowly make the rounds. There were some faces she recognised, veterans from the tours before her hiatus; where she could she called them by name, and she remembered more than a few. For new faces, she made a point to introduce herself, ask them their name, take a moment to memorise their faces while she signed. And then, regrettably quickly, she had to choose her next target as the crowd bayed for her attention. Standing at the door she walked in from, two security guards with black suits and wide shoulders cast a wary eye over the proceedings.

“Mikki! Mikki! Over here!”

“Mikki, can I go next?”

“Don’t rush her. She’ll see all of us.”

At least, she thought, an excited after-party usually meant she’d nailed the show itself. They were still riding the buzz. Even if all the voices got annoying sometimes, there was a certain satisfaction in it. Even if she would have preferred something quieter and more relaxed, she was still happy. And then, in a voice quiet enough to stand out amongst all the shouting, she heard:

“ _Sham!_ ”

Her heart stopped.

Her smile froze in place; her pen left off mid-autograph. How long had it been since she last heard anybody use that name? She had been Mikki for a while now. Before that, she was Jenna with her band of Gems; even longer ago she had been Stella, Britney, Celja. But now she was Sham again, Sham wearing a mask called Mikki, Sham trying desperately not to let that mask slip. She lurched back into motion, finished her autograph – the tail end of the signature was wrong, because she was signing a name that suddenly no longer applied to her – and cast a glance around the room, eyes narrowed, trying to pick out the right face, the right voice –

She saw her right as the security guard began to move. Her staff were fantastic. Almost like family. They’d noticed there was something wrong straight away, and found the source just as quickly as she did. A girl with long, blonde hair, piercing green eyes, an expression that was both hopeful and painful at the same time. She wasn’t looking at the security guards. They didn’t exist to her. Her eyes were locked on Sham’s face.

“Sham. Sham, it’s me,” she said. Her voice was urgent, as if she were begging for food or water or air. _Please, be you. Please, remember me._

Sham’s mind raced. The security guard was going to reach her – her, _Sora,_ after all these years, after all this time, here, now – before she could, and then… what? Would Sora just let herself be escorted out without a struggle? Not now, not here. The look on her face was too serious, too intense. Then – oh god. Oh god. An ordinary human being was about to get into a fight with Sora. She wanted to scream. She wanted to break into a sprint. Her body wouldn’t let her do either. She took a long step towards them but it wasn’t enough, the security guard was already closing in–

“Hey, get out of the way,” he said, in a voice that was gruff and booming.

“Oh? I do apologise,” the girl said. She had blonde, curled hair and had definitely – almost definitely – deliberately shifted into the guard’s way. She didn’t seem worried at all; her expression was a knowing, confident smile. “What seems to be the problem?”

“That girl behind you is being disruptive. I’m going to have to ask her to–”

“Oh, you _guuuuuuuys!_ I thought I told you to wait in the room!” Her voice finally came out, all energy and sparkle – like she had been practising for years upon years, decades upon decades. “Let me guess, you forgot your passes again? You dummies~<3!”

“Sorry.” The reply came from a girl with long grey hair and a Poppomikki Sunshine t-shirt that was far too large for her. She had serious red eyes. “We must have left them at the house. We didn’t realise until we got here.”

Sham breathed a sigh of relief. They were playing along. Good. The security guard looked at her with raised eyebrows, a look of surprise. Sora seemed just as confused.

“Sorry, but I have to spend some quality time with my fans right now. Here, this is my ID card. Greg–” she said, and flashed an imperious look at the security guard – “Could you please take them to my dressing room? I don’t want them to get lost.”

The guard’s eyes narrowed. There was definitely something wrong here, but the look in her eyes told him not to ask any awkward questions – at least, not right now. Reluctantly, he jerked his thumb towards the door. “Alright. Come on, you three.”

“Don’t worry. Just wait for me, okay?” she hissed to Sora, as quietly as she could. “I’ll finish up here, then come and see you. I promise.”

There was definitely worry in the girl’s eyes, but after a momentary pause, she allowed herself to be lead away with her friends. Sham’s heart, hammering inside her chest, slowed down just a fraction.

But the autographs she gave were noticeably more shaky than the ones before.

* * *

 

“Sora, you’re going to wear a hole in the carpet,” Hime said cheerfully. She had good reason to be cheerful. Whether Poppomikki Sunshine was indeed Sham or not, her dressing room had both a water cooler and a very comfy armchair that Hime had immediately commandeered.

Sora ignored her and kept pacing, her hands balled into fists at her side. She crossed the room in three long steps, about turned, and repeated. As measured and efficient as a soldier marching on parade. All thoughts of having a pleasant day out or just enjoying the concert had quickly gone out of the window, to be replaced by a terse silence.

Suguri, leaning against the wall near Hime’s chosen chair, said nothing. She thought it would be more helpful for Sora to have somebody calm and quiet around while she went over her own thoughts. The girl was stressed, and understandably so, but this was a fairly good outcome. It seemed like ‘Mikki’ either was Sham or knew something about her, either of which was a fantastic outcome. As for herself, well… She was just thankful to Hime for stepping in front of the guard when she did. If he had actually touched Sora when she was so agitated, she knew exactly what would have happened – Sora would have removed his hand from her body, and then probably removed his arm from its socket right afterwards. That would have… _complicated_ the situation, in ways that even Suguri wasn’t sure she could fix.

The seconds ticked by and became minutes; five, ten, and then fifteen. Slowly, Suguri began to become worried. Sora’s expression was gradually changing from a girl who was stressed to a girl who might or might not be trying not to cry. Then, at last they heard a knock on the door: small, gentle. Surprisingly timid. Not quite the knock expected from an idol about to walk into her own dressing room.

But when the door opened, there she was. She looked somehow smaller than earlier; she had her hands balled up underneath the cuffs of her sleeves. The energy that had poured out of every movement she made had gone, like she was the spring in a watch that hadn’t be wound.

“Sham,” Sora said, taking a step towards her. Her voice had lost none of the ragged, urgent edge it had earlier. “It’s you, isn’t it? Do you remember me?”

There was a moment of silence. The idol’s face softened. Then, almost out of nowhere, she burst into tears.

“Of _course_ I remember you, you dummy!” she bawled. “Soraaaaaaaaaaa!”

It happened before even Suguri could blink. One moment they were standing apart, and the next they were hugging. How many times had Sham imagined this in the past millennia? How many thousands of scenarios had she pictured? In her imagination, Sora also hugged her so softly, so tenderly. She always smelled of fresh linen. But the real Sora was sweaty and hugged her so tightly, so desperately, the kind of hug you gave to somebody who you thought had died. It was the best hug she’d ever had.

“I knew it was you. I saw you on the internet and just knew. I came to see you. I missed you,” Sora said, her voice low and quiet. Her breath tickled Sham’s ears.

“I… I found you after the war, and put you in a life support capsule. I came by every few hundred years to maintain it and check on you, but… you were always, always asleep. I… thought you would never wake up! I waited ten thousand years for you, you dummy!” Sham said, her voice cracking. She felt almost hysterical. “And now look at you. You got taller, didn’t you? You’re definitely taller. And you have muscles!”

“Mn. I do lots of gardening. I could lift a whole bear,” Sora replied dreamily.

“I bet you could lift five bears!”

“Five bears is too many bears. They only ever come in packs of three. A mom bear, a dad bear, and a baby bear.” She paused. “I really liked your show. You’re a good idol.”

“I know, right?! I dedicated myself to being super cute so I could spread a message of love and peace and wearing pink every day!”

“It’s an important job.”

Neither of them noticed when Suguri gently tapped Hime on the shoulder and gestured towards the door. They were too wrapped in their conversation, in dancing loops around the things they really wanted to say, in taking flights of fancy and working themselves back. Sora had begun to say something along the lines of “sorry I shot you” when Hime finally pressed the door shut behind her.

“…Hah. I was worried there. But those two seem like they’re on the same wavelength… I think,” Suguri said.

Hime reached down and gave her hand a squeeze. “All’s well that ends well, I suppose. By the way… it was very sensitive of you to give them some time to themselves. Even I was just sitting there, watching it unfold. I’m impressed.” She moved behind her, put her hands on her hips, and pulled her back into an embrace.

“…Mmn. Don’t laugh, alright? But I… kinda sympathise with her. Sham, I mean.”

“Oh?”

“She said she waited ten thousand years for Sora to wake up. That’s… kind’ve crazy, right? But… I feel like that about you.” She took a little breath. “When we met, you… um. Filled such a big hole in my life. It was like I had been waiting for you the whole time, and didn’t know it.”

“Oh, my,” Hime said softly. “…It’s embarrassing when you say it so openly.”

“ _You’re_ embarrassed? Usually, you’re the one teasing me.”

“Oh, I tease you for a lot of reasons, you know. Sometimes it’s because you’re fun to tease. Sometimes, I just want to make you laugh or smile or blush. And sometimes…” She paused, moved Suguri’s hair out of the way and pressed a kiss to the back of her neck. “Sometimes… It lets me say the things I really mean, or really want, without feeling too heavy about it, since I know you’ll assume it’s a joke.”

“Do you do that often?”

“Well, I’m always inviting you to take a shower with me, aren’t I?”

Suguri turned her head to look her in the eye. “…You’re kidding, right?”

“Maybe,” Hime said lightly. There was mischief in her voice. “For now, let’s go and find somewhere to grab a drink, and let those two sort themselves out. I’m sure they’ll be fine.”

“Mm. …I wonder if we can persuade Mik – _Sham,_ to give us a free t-shirt,” Suguri mused, looking down at the one swamping her. “Maybe they have backstock.”

Hime smirked. “Oh, my. Well, I’m glad to know that seeing your favourite pop idol break down in tears hasn’t stopped you from being her biggest fan.”

She looked back at the room where Sora and Sham were still talking, smiled, and shook her head.

“I’m still a fan,” Suguri said. “But somehow, I don’t think I’m the biggest.”


	34. Beach Party (I)

If there was one thing that had never ceased to surprise Nath, it was how much she could achieve when she had nothing better to do. When she had visited her summer home in the past, she’d made it a habit to bring along whatever half-finished collections she had lying around, so she could spend her idle hours mounting and categorising. It was a task that had grown habitual, comforting. Stagnant.

This year, there was no collection. All there was to do was drink, relax in the sun, and work on the house – and the first two had unpleasant consequences if she indulged too much. As a result, she had made fantastic progress. She had mercilessly hunted and destroyed a year’s worth of dust bunnies. She had attacked the floorboards with sandpaper and varnish. She had led a coup against her cracked stucco walling and replaced it with stucco she felt would be more loyal. The kitchen was liveable again, the wine rack stocked, the bedrooms aired and stacked with fresh linen.

As such, she though it was fine to cut herself a little slack. She had allowed her single daily glass of wine to become three, and her half-hour of sunbathing to turn into watching the sunset under a beach umbrella. She was on the cusp of falling asleep to the sound of the waves when she heard the shrill ringing of the phone from the house.

It was a testament to years of discipline that she roused herself from the beach to go and pick it up; the fact that she was more excited than grumpy about it was a testament to something else entirely. She scooped the phone from the receiver, cradled it against her ear, and said: “Hi, Sora.”

“ _How did you know it was me?”_

“How many people do you think I give this number out to?” she asked. Who needed caller ID, anyway? “So, what did you call me for?”

“ _What are you wearing?”_

It took Nath’s brain a moment to register the words. Then she double-checked her memory, just in case, and it came back with the same result. “Uh…What?”

“ _That’s what Hime always says first when she has to call Suguri.”_

And, no doubt, she always got the same answer. Of the many qualities Suguri might have had, being sartorially innovative wasn’t one of them. Nath’s eyebrows furrowed, and she got the distinct impression that Sora was making an attempt at a joke.

“That might be true,” she replied cagily, “but I don’t buy that you’d just repeat it without thinking about the implications. I think you’re teasing me.”

“ _Hm. You caught me. Well done.”_ There was a bizarrely honest sense of pride in her voice.

Nath sighed. “Well, of course.”

“ _So what are you wearing?”_

“ _Clothes_ ,” Nath said, rolling her eyes. Strictly speaking, this was false; the actual answer was more along the lines of ‘sunscreen’. “What’s gotten into you today?”

“ _We had pizza. But listen. I found a friend.”_

Found a friend. What a charming way of putting it – as if a friend had just been lying around somewhere and she had picked them up. Actually, it sounded like what you’d say if you had adopted a cat. That wasn’t out of the realm of possibility, come to think of it.

“ _Can I bring her with me when I come to visit?”_

“Ah… I don’t know.” She shifted her weight to her other leg. Her mind was casting back to the soldier’s cemetery she had made a little way away from the house. It was… a very private place, to her. She wanted to bring Sora there, as a fellow survivor of the war. Suguri and Hime… would be a stretch, but she could manage it. But to bring a total stranger into that place? She wasn’t sure she was ready for that. “I… don’t mind you bringing Suguri and Hime, but somebody I don’t know…?”

“ _You might know her, actually. She was in the War with us. On our side, before I went off on my own.”_

“Y… you found another survivor? That’s crazy,” she said, unable to keep the confusion out of her voice. “The chances of anybody surviving that war were low enough. The chances of someone surviving and then you finding them this long after it–”

“ _I found **you** on the street.”_ There was a certain snappishness to Sora’s voice, as though this was an argument she had lost patience with already. _“I knew her before I even started fighting in the war. She’s definitely the same person. Her name is Sham.”_

Sham… Sham? Did she know that name? She felt like she might, but she couldn’t put her finger on it. Had she run across it on one of the dog tags she’d found? Was it one of the names on the cemetery’s monument? She couldn’t put a face to it. She found herself frowning, her eyebrows furrowing. In death, every soldier was equal. But in life… Well. Not all of them had made the same kind of impression on her that Sora had. Still, a soldier was a soldier. A friend was a friend.

“…Alright. You can bring her along.”

“ _Roger. Thank you. It’ll be nice… to be with so many friends.”_

Nath smiled. “Well. I just hope we all get along. Did you get your swimsuit yet?”

“ _Not yet. I’m going to ask Hime to help me pick. She’s good at fashion.”_

“Okay. I’ll see you soon, then.”

“ _Mm. See you soon.”_

As usual, Sora hung up promptly; as usual, it had been a rollercoaster ride of a conversation. Nath set the phone back on its hook, walked to the bedroom, and made a slow and graceful flop onto the bed. (She had, in the past, thrown herself onto the bed, but most bedframes were ill-equipped to endure a full Nath body slam).

“A new, old friend, huh?” she muttered to herself, extending one prosthetic hand towards the ceiling. She felt… something. A little bittersweet, maybe. She wondered if this new friend was like her. As damaged, as solitary, as she had been. She wondered if Sora would begin to drift away from her, now that she had another old comrade to attend to. She wondered if, after only a short time in this old house, she had already become lonely. It used to take years for her to feel the need for other people. Was this a good change or a bad one? She couldn’t tell.

Beyond that, she felt drowsy. Sleep took her, in the end.

* * *

 

“Hi, hi! Everybody’s favourite, Sham, has arrived!”

It had happened so suddenly. One moment they were alone; the next, she was bearing down on their table at the coffee shop like a friend-seeking missile. Perhaps, Hime thought, she just hadn’t recognised the idol out of her work clothes. They had only recently become acquainted, after all, and today Sham had forgone the light clothes an an idol in favour of a hoodie with a giant, super-deformed cat’s face on the front, with the front pocket decorated like a muzzle. Hime felt warm just looking at her. It was too hot a day for hoodies; today was a day for thin cotton and iced tea.

“You don’t have to announce it, you know,” Hime told her as she sat down. “Or pose, for that matter.”

“Wahaha! That’s where you’re wrong. Announcing yourself with a pose boosts your star power! And if you do it often enough, you stop feeling embarrassed about it at all!” Sham declared. Her idol’s passion had been excited by Sora’s impassioned pleas for help; she didn’t feel the heat from the sun, because her blood was burning hotter. “Sora! What’s our mission for today?”

Sora was pondering whether she should change their mission to something involving ice cream. Her straw sun hat was helping a little, and so was the loose, lacy dress that Hime had helped her pick out, but she was still more than a little hot and bothered. Sham seemed like she would be a fun person to eat ice cream with. But she shook her head, and returned to her original objective.

“I’m going to visit Nath at her summer house soon. She said I could bring both of you and Suguri with me as well,” she explained. “But she has a beach, so we need swimsuits. And I need to pick a swimsuit out for Nath as well.”

“H-huuuh? I’m invited as well?” Sham gasped, before backtracking. “Wait, wait, wait. She’s letting you pick a swimsuit for her to wear?! You must be really close…”

“She’s bad at underwear and swimsuits, so she gets me to help her since I know her sizes.”

Sham reeled back in shock, her hand over her mouth. Her voice came out as a squeak. “She even lets you pick out her underwear?!”

“Only one time.”

“Ahahaha. As amusing as your reactions are, don’t let Sora give you the wrong idea. They’re just friends,” Hime giggled. Sham didn’t _quite_ fulfil the same primal desire for entertainment as wrestling did, but she was certainly dramatic enough to be fun. “As I understand it, Nath just… well… prefers to keep her basement breezy, shall we say?”

“…Ah… Ahahaha… I feel like this is forbidden knowledge…” Sham laughed weakly. She didn’t know if she was embarrassed or just feeling the heat. Sora had a cup of raspberry iced tea that she was ignoring and it was calling out to her.

“Yes, well. If you talk to Sora for any length of time, you’ll hear more than enough about Nath, I can assure you. The short version is that she’s a ten thousand year old war veteran with no arms, and when she headbutts you, you fall down and don’t get up again,” Hime explained.

“War veteran… of the Great War? Wow, that’s… Wait, wait, wait! More importantly! Does this mean I’m not the only ten-thousand year old lady you know?!”

Sora nodded. “Mm. Hime and Suguri are ten thousand, as well. I don’t actually have any friends who aren’t. Except for Nath’s cat. He’s not ten thousand. He’s more like… two.”

“S-so you don’t think I’m an old lady?!”

Sora tilted her head. “No? You’re Sham.”

Hime watched Sham’s reaction with barely-concealed curiosity. She had, after all, never seen a grown woman well up with tears at being told her own name.

“ _Soraaaaaa_!! You’re the best, you know that?! Okay, I’ve decided! I’m going to use all my swimsuit experience as an idol to help you pick the best one! You’re going to be super cute! No, ultra cute! The most cute!” She slammed her fists down on the table. “I’m all fired up now! Let’s go, go, go!”

“Roger,” Sora replied, and slammed her entire iced tea in three long gulps. If it gave her brain freeze, she didn’t show it. “When we team up, nobody will be able to stop us.”

“That’s right! Teamwork and bikinis are my two greatest strengths!”

“Alright. Calm down, you two,” Hime said affectionately. Sora was so quiet usually, and Sham seemed like she would be responsible enough by herself, but put them together and you got a ball of noise and energy. It was like dealing with Saki and Kae all over again – very nostalgic. “I did have a suggestion for our little outing.”

Sora narrowed her eyes, and raking Hime’s face with a scouring glance. She was looking for a sparkle of the eyes, a quirk of the mouth. She found them quickly enough. Hime was used to doing largely as she pleased, in as bold and straightforward a way as she liked; she hadn’t learned to hide the telling expression she had when she was plotting something.

“No. You’re wearing your mischief face,” Sora accused.

“I am not!” Hime said, which was the biggest lie she had told all day. “I’m just… imagining how _happy_ Nath would be if we ended up doing what I have in mind!”

Sora paused. On one hand, it was wise not to trust Hime as far as you could throw her, because Hime was very light and throwable and might float while in transit. On the other hand, there was the prospect of a happy Nath. A happy Nath was the best variety of Nath, and, historically, one of the rarest. You didn’t just find one in the wild; they had to be cultivated, like a delicate flower in the garden. She was getting good at gardening, Suguri said. She wanted to be good at making happy Naths, too.

“I’m listening.”

“Since Nath has been so kind as to invite _all_ of us as guests to her summer house, why don’t Sham and I pick out swimsuits for her as well?” Hime asked, with a rhetorical flourish. Sora’s expression was still unsold, and she hurriedly added a coda. “After all, she does so dislike shopping for swimsuits and undergarments and the like. This way, she doesn’t have to do it for three times as long.”

“Well, I’m for it! I’m always ready to help a girl look super cute and ultra pretty!” Sham interjected, striking a pose. “That’s an idol’s way of life!”

“See? Sham wants to,” Hime said, fluttering her eyelashes. She mouthed a silent word of thanks to Sham, but Sora still seemed unconvinced. Reluctantly – although not very – she decided she would have to play a little dirty. “If you like, we can even make a little competition out of it. Whoever gets Nath the best swimsuit can boss around the other two for a day. How about that?”

The terms, Hime knew, were a little lopsided. For her, bossing Sora around meant a day free of chores; bossing Sham around would be a private performance for Suguri and some brownie points for herself. And Sham, no doubt, was imagining some fun activity she could drag Sora and Hime around for. But Sora, she knew, didn’t really have any use for bossing around her friends. What she _did_ have was a competitive spirit and a home field advantage. She knew Nath the best, and therefore should be able to get the best swimsuit for her. She knew that. But she was still wavering, just a tiny bit. Hime made one last push.

“And anyway,” she said, affecting a languid air, “what’s the harm? Even if, say, Sham and I make horrible choices, she still has your swimsuit to fall back on, right? Or do you not think you can pick a swimsuit she likes?”

Sora’s eyes narrowed, and Hime knew she’d done enough. “Fine. But when I win, I’ll make you give me all your ice cream tubs. Even the ones you hid behind the frozen pastries.”

“ _If_ you win,” Hime rejoined, and made a note to relocate her stash to her stomach when the opportunity allowed.

They were interrupted by a noise that could only be described as ‘ominous’ emanating from Sham. Desire was written all over her face; her smile was as sharp as the curve of a knife. “Hee hee… hee hee hee… You two are gonna be my _backup dancers!_ Quick, Sora! Tell me her measurements. I’ve worn more swimsuits than either of you has had hot dinners! I’ll claim this victory in no time flat!”

Sora frowned, and motioned for the other two to gather closer. While Nath seemed to have accepted her body for what it was, it was probably still rude to broadcast her measurements in a public discussion. When Sham and Hime closed the circle, she let the secrets slip in a low whisper.

“Gu-gumumu… those are… pretty formidable…” Sham said faintly. The colour seemed to have drained out of her cheeks a little.

“Yes,” Hime agreed. “Nath, in my experience, is something like a palm tree. Tall, a little prickly… and _laden_ with bounty,” she said, and left no question as to whereabouts the bounty was situated.

“Nath is Nath,” Sora said seriously, “just like Sham is Sham. …Don’t get her anything weird.”

Hime smiled, took a long sip of her tea, and raised her hand as if to make an oath. “I would never. Scout’s honour.”

Nobody, not even Sham, seemed to believe her.

* * *

 

Hime enjoyed clothes shopping in a way that was unique amongst her friends. Suguri avoided it, if at all possible; Nath gritted her teeth and did it only begrudgingly; Sora rushed through it, as though it were a mission she had to complete; and even Sham seemed to enjoy it in a very cheery and direct way. For Hime, it was a meditative process. A journey of the imagination. She would slowly browse through each article and picture how it would look if she wore it, or how Suguri would look wearing it, or how Suguri would look _not_ wearing it. (Admittedly the answer to the last part was always the same, but it was always enjoyable as well). She didn’t hurry, and she was very rarely overcome by excitement. It was a purely intellectual form of enjoyment.

Today was no different. Although Sham and Sora had crashed into the store like a fireball and immediately set about rifling through everything that looked even vaguely waterproof, she had quietly sidled in and began looking through things that were lacy and unmentionable, not always in that order or in equal amounts. It was partly because Suguri had given her carte blanche to pick out a set of underwear for her, and then given her carte blanche to make her wear anything in her wardrobe. If she put the two together, it meant that once the lingerie was in Suguri’s wardrobe, she couldn’t avoid showing it off at least once.

But the other reason for going her own direction was simply to give Sham and Sora some space. They hadn’t, to the best of her knowledge, had much time to just sit down and talk privately with each other. When they met again for the first time in ten thousand years, it hadn’t been long before Sham’s producer burst into the room and demanded to know who they all were and why his star idol was bawling into Sora’s chest. They had been… well, not really _escorted_ from the premises, but Sham had advised them to to go home for the day so she could assert herself. She’d pressed a contact number into Sora’s palm and that was that; their grand adventure, stymied for the day.

There must, she thought, be things the two wanted to say to each other, away from prying eyes and prying ears. The last time they saw each other before their reunion, shots had been fired, betrayals – however unavoidable, however misunderstood – had been made. There was no way they could dance around it forever, and no reason Hime thought Sora would; the girl preferred the air to be clear, for good or for ill. She was also of the opinion that Sham was hiding a lot of hurt under her cheerful attitude. It was brave to smile when you felt bad on the inside – even cute, maybe – but it wouldn’t take the ache away.

Exactly _what_ they might say to each other was something she could only guess at, and thus far, all of her guesses had been dramatic and entertaining. A touching and heartfelt reunion? A thawing of hearts grown distant? Maybe even… a confession, a love nurtured over many millennia? She giggled just to think of it. Perhaps Suguri was right, and she was watching too much wrestling. But the larger-than-life storylines were just so _titillating_ , and that was before anybody got hit with a chair.

It may have seemed odd that Hime wasn’t thinking about what swimsuit she should get for Nath, but to be completely honest, she had found her offering within seconds of walking into the store. It wouldn’t win the contest, of course, and that was fine. Sora had a home field advantage and was the most likely to win, which was lovely – aside from the odd spot of ice cream larceny, she would almost certainly do nothing with her day in power, and ice cream was far easier to replace than dignity. Sham also had an outside chance of winning; she had mentioned years of swimsuit experience, and Hime was sure that idols wore more swimsuits more often than the average human being. But being a backup dancer might be an adventure, and she could imagine Suguri loving nothing more than a show with her favourite idol on vocals and the two people closest to her as support.

Her own chances of winning were… practically non-existent, to be fair. In fact, she was quite sure that Nath would _hate_ what she had picked out, at first. She _might_ grow to love it later, depending on how well she read intentions and how bold she felt, but the initial reaction was definitely going to be bad. But in the end, it would serve the greater good. And be funny, which was just as important.

She was interrupted in her musings by the sound of somebody running full tilt at her. It was very difficult to run full tilt in a store littered with racks of underwear, but Sham was bobbing and weaving with the best of them, spelunking through a maze of lace, underwire and spandex at a dead sprint.

“Sham, whatever seems to be the matter?” she asked as the idol skidded to a halt mere feet in front of her.

She didn’t reply, at least in any language that Hime could understand. She wasn’t fluent in wild gesticulation. Patiently, she waited for Sham to find her tongue.

“When you look at Sora with her clothes on,” the idol said, at a volume that was just a touch uncomfortable, “she totally looks like she’d be a cute, squidgy cinnamon roll, right?”

A long moment passed. Hime’s eyes narrowed.

“…I’m sorry. What?”

“A cute squidgy cinnamon roll! But when she tried on the swimsuit she picked out, her tummy – it’s so toned!” Sham shouted, and put her hands on Hime’s shoulders. They landed with an audible thump. “ _What did you do to her?!”_

Hime decided that Sham was a lunatic, which was not uncommon in her social circles, and might actually count as praise. “We… fed her and gave her exercise, mostly?”

Sham’s eyes lit up with an almost religious zeal, like a knight about to embark on a crusade. For a second Hime almost wanted to give her a broadsword and a bucket helmet, although upon further consideration, she definitely did _not_ want to give Sham a broadsword. “Can you do that to me, too?! I _want_ that belly! I want that belly, and I want _my_ belly to look just like it!”

“N…Now, now, Sham. I’m sure your belly is perfectly charming–”

“Of course it is! I’ve been trying for hundreds of years to make my belly one of the best bellies around! My curves are what separate me from every other idol in the business! But Sora’s belly isn’t just good, it’s _perfect_. I _need_ it.”

“Perfect? Well, I don’t know about that…” Hime replied. She had her own ideas about what the perfect belly was. Granted, she hadn’t performed a detailed inspect of Sora’s, so its perfection might exceed her estimates, but she had seen parts of Suguri’s belly and decided it was more than perfect enough for her. “I’ve seen better bellies.”

In the sophisticated and rarefied circles in which they both moved, these were the dictionary definition of ‘fightin’ words’. One moment, they were two women bonding (?) over the shared experience of bellies; the next they were reaching for their weapons, which at the moment were limited to the shoes they were wearing. Hime had heels, which gave her a natural attack bonus, but Sham’s slip-ons had a faster rate of fire. It was impossible to predict who the winner would be; reluctant to begin a war that might escalate horribly, they settled into a tense showdown, neither willing to make the first move. What they needed was some kind of independent adjudicator, a neutral outside force to mediate the conflict.

“…Sham’s right.” It was Sora, who had silently appeared from behind a rack of lingerie too daring to wear without a blush. She wasn’t exactly unbiased, but Sora with her bare hands was more powerful than Sham and Hime’s shoes put together, and all three of them knew it. Once again, a tragic conflict had been ended by her timely intervention and willingness to beat up both sides.

“…Oh? You’re done already?” Hime asked, spying a shopping bag in Sora’s hands.

“Mm.”

“What did you get?”

“A blue one.”

Hime immediately switched on her ‘patient big sister’ voice. “Sora. There are _many_ blue ones. Which particular blue one did you get?”

Sora looked over at Sham blankly, as if asking for help with a difficult maths question. “It’s a sky blue one. Right?”

“Right! For Sora, it’s gotta be sky blue. The quickest path to cuteness is to make sure your outside reflects your super cute inside!”

“Most people’s insides,” Hime remarked dryly, “are full of bone and muscle and other very not-cute things. Also, sky blue doesn’t really reflect Sora on the inside. It reflects her name.”

“My name’s cute, though. It’s got four letters, so it’s small, and small things are cute.”

“In that case, it’s no cuter than my name, or Sham’s. By the by, I don’t think small things are necessarily cute. Certainly, the majority are, but wasps exist.”

“Wasps _do_ exist,” Sham murmured. “You’ve got us there.”

Sora said nothing, because she kept her shield capacitor on her at all times. There was no wasp in the world powerful enough to break her barrier, and if they tried, the result was the same as if they’d launched an assault against a bug zapper. So mostly, they buzzed around her impotently, which she thought was a little cute. Anything that wanted to hurt you but was too pathetic to do so had some amount of cuteness to it, in her opinion. The strong should protect the weak, even if the weak didn’t like them.

“What about you, Sham?” Hime asked, turning to her. “Are you done?”

“Actually,” the idol said, scratching her head, “I was thinking about it, and there’s some stuff in the costume department that I could probably use.”

Sora scowled. “That’s cheating, though.”

“It’s not cheating! It’s just being resourceful. Waste not, want not!”

Hime smiled. “I see. Well, I’m not quite done yet. Give me five or ten minutes and we can go. You can wait outside, if you like.”

“Mm.” Sora nodded. Waiting outside made sense. Outside was where ice cream was. Inside was where ice cream wasn’t. This was the truth of the world. As she thought about a delicious fusion of dairy, sugar and chemistry, she realised that there was a shibboleth she had not yet applied to her new old friend. “Sham, rocky road ice cream is better than strawberry, right?”

“Ignore her,” Hime snapped. “Strawberry is far superior. Sora, it’s cheating to ask leading questions.”

“It’s not cheating. It’s just being resourceful.”

“Actually,” Sham said, a little sheepishly, “I’m a neapolitan kinda gal, you know? I don’t eat ice cream a lot because I have to keep in shape, but when I do, I like to get a whole bunch of flavours.”

Hime and Sora looked at each other, quickly trying to calculate how they could interpret Sham’s opinion in their own favour. Hime was quicker. “I see. Well, neapolitan contains strawberry but not rocky road, so I shall count that as a vote in strawberry’s favour.”

“No way. It has chocolate. Rocky road is just upgraded chocolate, so it still counts. And it’s got vanilla, too, so it’s a vote for Nath as well.”

“But chocolate _isn’t_ rocky road. I’ll give you half a vote, but that still means that rocky road is slightly inferior to strawberry or vanilla.”

“I don’t accept it,” Sora said, shaking her head fiercely. “The only reason it’s chocolate instead of rocky road is because rocky road would make the other ice cream look bad in the bowl. All we’ve found out is that Suguri is wrong.”

Sham watched as the argument deepened. In the end, Sora stayed in the shop to better demonstrate her point; they were still arguing when Hime paid at the tills, and became so embroiled in their debate that they forgot to buy ice cream on the way home at all. As she waved them goodbye and thanked them for a day full of adventure, companionship and a very delicious-looking belly, she found herself breathing a very deep sigh of relief. Only when she was halfway home did she dare to mutter to herself following forbidden words:

“I’m really glad I didn’t tell them I prefer sorbet.”


	35. Beach Party (II)

There is a softness at the edges of her smile, the hint of words lingering unsaid upon her lips; when they embrace, her hair has the smell of the sea. For a long moment, the rest of the world fades into the background; there is only warmth, colour, the sounds of seagulls over the ocean. It has been too long, Nath thinks, since they last saw each other. She breathes deeply, and feels the gnawing pangs of loneliness recede like a wave.

“Oh, my. Should we leave you two alone?” Hime’s voice is wry, teasing, but kind as well. She has a smile of her own, small and secretive, as she watches the two old soldiers’ reunion. “It’s good to see you, Nath. You’re looking very well.”

She doesn’t know quite what to say to that, and it feels rude to talk to somebody else while there’s a hug in progress, so she just nods. She _does_ look well; she spent some time this morning in front of the mirror, an hour of nervous grooming and poring over her wardrobe. She chose a button-up shirt with an open collar, a pair of tan pants rolled at the knee. Such a lot of thought for something so simple. She thinks – she hopes – that she looks casual and elegant, only a pair of sandals away from an island vacation. But the sleeves feel baggy around the wrists of her prosthetics, which are too small and thin for her frame. It irks her, and she almost left her arms in the umbrella stand because of it, but she’s willing to sacrifice her small vanities for the chance to give her friend a better hug.

After a few seconds more, Sora sighs and steps back, absent-mindedly brushes the creases from her top. They almost match – she’s wearing a white vest top, a brown skirt with a red stripe print near the hem. With her shield capacitor hanging from her neck like a talisman, she looks more at home in this tropical place than even Nath does. She turns and glances at the women behind her, looking for Sham.

“Aren’t you going to introduce yourself?” she asks. From anybody else, it might sound like an accusation; from her, it’s an invitation.

The girl steps forward, and Nath runs her eyes over her as she does. A somewhat rounded figure, a pleasing kind of suppleness. Shapely legs shown off with a skirt and pantyhose. She certainly isn’t bad looking, Nath thinks, but she’s oddly dressed for weather like this – as cute as her cat hoodie is, she must be boiling wearing it. Then Nath’s eyes find her face, the long scar and the burn running down it, and understands. There is a kind of heat the body never forgets; next to that, even the roaring sun must feel inconsequential.

“H… hey there. I’m Sham. You must be Nath, right…? It’s, um, nice to meet you.”

Nath raises a hand in greeting, but she doesn’t miss the shock on Hime’s face, or the way that Sora’s eyebrows furrow.

“Are you alright, Sham? It seems unlike you to be nervous. You didn’t even pose when you introduced yourself. I have it from a reliable source that posing increases your star power,” Hime says, putting a comforting hand on the girl’s sleeve.

Sham’s face is embarrassed, but her eyes are inscrutable. “Well, ahaha… She’s like my senior, right? In age, and with Sora… So I guess I’m a little…”

“Nath won’t bite,” Sora says warmly. “Not even Roger bites, and he’s Nath’s cat.”

There’s a moment of dead air before Suguri steps in, her voice cool but quietly insistent. “She’s probably tired from the flight. She did say she doesn’t fly around as much as she used to. Maybe we should go inside.”

“Ah… Yes. Sorry. I’m not good at the whole ‘host’ thing,” Nath says, accepting the hint for what it is. “Let’s get inside. It should be a lot cooler.”

With Nath at the point of their quintet, they make their way into the house. The place has come a long way from what it was; for a moment, Nath is almost sad they never got to see it while it was in disrepair, and cannot appreciate the progress as she does. The floorboards are polished, and the walls are pristine; she’s installed a coffee table in the centre of the living room, and furnished it with a tiny potted cactus, a folded newspaper, and an array of cushions to orbit the ensemble. She even made the mistake of buying a novelty clock that looks like a cat, complete with a tail for a pendulum; her fondest desire is to launch the damn thing into the ocean, because she cannot stand its interminable _ticking_. She had thought that being able to hear the passage of time would spur her on to be more productive, but mostly it just annoys her when she’s trying to sleep.

There’s snacks and bottled water in the fridge. I’ve set up some bedrooms on the left,” she says, snapping off her directions with brisk authority. “I had some problems getting beds in, so we’ve got a double, two singles, and a sleeping bag. We can draw straws for who has to use the sleeping bag–”

“Oh. Because it’s the most desirable bed, right?” Sora chimes in wistfully. “I wondered if I’d get it automatically, but I can do democracy.”

“Oh… I forgot that you were a sleeping bag fanatic,” she replies, a little uncertainly. “Well… I’m sure the others won’t complain if I let you have it without drawing straws. That just leaves the problem of the double bed.”

This time, Hime pipes up. “Oh, I think Suguri and I will take that, if nobody else minds. We’re quite used to sharing a bed, and truth be told, I’m so used to sleeping _with_ her that I’m not sure I could get to sleep _without_ her.”

Sham gasps, perhaps a little theatrically, and looks at Hime with renewed wonder. “Awawawa… You mean in the _adult_ way?”

“Ohoho. I shall leave that up to your imagination.”

“She means no,” Suguri replies flatly.

“And definitely not in my bed, thank you. I’m the one who has to clean those sheets,” Nath grumbles.

Hime laughs, with a sound like a tinkling bell. The conversation adjourns as they scatter to make themselves at home. Suguri disappears into the bedrooms to set out their luggage, and to build a wall of pillows on Nath’s double-bed; Hime casts her eyes around the room, almost marvelling at the sight of furniture that matches; Sham throws herself down on a cushion; Sora wanders over to the fridge.

“Is all of this okay to eat?” she asks, pulling the door open.

“Yes. Help yourself. There’s ice cream in the top compartment.”

To her great surprise, Sora does not immediately rummage around for ice cream, but instead brings out a large platter full of cocktail sausages and cheese cubes that have been threaded onto skewers, and puts it on the kitchen counter.

“Sham,” she says. “I need your help with this.”

Sighing, the idol gets to her feet and trots to the counter. “Sure, sure.”

For the next few minutes, all Nath can do is watch in growing bemusement as Sora takes a skewer, picks off the cocktail sausage, tosses it into her mouth and passes the skewer to Sham, who eats the cheese cube and sets the skewer aside. There’s no wasted motion, not a single skipped beat; they go through each action as efficiently as robots on an assembly line, repeating until they’ve demolished the entire platter. Nath gives Hime an aside glance, only to find her looking just as baffled as Nath feels.

“Did they… uh… practice this?” she asks quietly.

“No, I don’t believe so. I think this is just… _them_ , I’m afraid. It’s quite impressive, though. They’re very co-ordinated.”

“You aren’t wrong. It’s also impressive that they finished the whole platter. It was meant to feed five people.”

Sham freezes, before snapping her head around so quickly that it’s a surprise there’s no audible crack. “W-waitwaitwait! You’re telling me I just ate _five people’s_ worth of cheese cubes?!”

Nath shrugs. “Looks like it.”

“ _Ahhhhhhhh_! All those calories…”

“Don’t worry, Sham,” Sora says, tugging at her elbow. “We vanquished the party platter, so it’s worth it. You can look good no matter what you eat.”

“I _know_ that. Even if I gain a little weight, I’d still be the same adoracute me, right? But my producer’s going to be real mad if I gain a dress size and then we have to get a whole new batch of tour outfits made up…” Sham moans, before casting her gaze about until it lands on Hime. “Why didn’t you stop me?”

“Well, I didn’t think you would finish the whole thing. No matter how you look at it, that’s rather a lot of cubes of cheese, you know? More to the point, why didn’t _you_ stop you?”

“I just got in the zone, you know? Don’t you ever get that, where you just hit your flow state and then suddenly a couple weeks have gone by while you were on autopilot?”

“Well, perhaps in the past,” Hime replies, stroking her chin. “But not lately. Suguri and Sora are too entertaining for me to switch my brain off.”

“I’m in the same boat, but with different people,” Nath remarks. “Suguri’s enough of a responsible adult to relax around, but zoning out with Sora or Hime in the room strikes me as a bad idea.”

Sora looks from one to the other, apparently blissfully unaware that she’s the one they’ve unanimously named as an agent of chaos terrorising their lives. “I never zone out,” she declares. “I’m always alert and on the ball.”

“Except when you’re asleep,” Hime points out, “which, historically, has been the case for maybe 99.99 percent of your lifespan. After all, you’ve been awake for roughly a year, but you were awake for ten thousand, correct?”

“I was awake all the time before I was asleep as well, so actually it’s more like 99.80 percent,” Sora sniffs. “And it doesn’t count, anyway. I’m alert in my dreams, no matter what they’re about.”

For a moment Nath wonders what kind of dreams Sora might have, but quickly dismisses the question. She’s sure that the answer will be fascinating, but also confusing on a deep, deep level that she doesn’t want to contemplate at this moment in time. Instead, she sits back and listens to Hime and Sora quibble about what mathematical percentage of Sora’s life she’s been asleep – Sora remains staunch at 99.80 percent, but Hime is pushing for 99.87 percent on the grounds that she spends a third of every waking day asleep anyway. Meanwhile, Sham is mournfully examining the skewers she set aside, trying to work out the exact number of cheese cubes she’s consumed. There’s something pitiable about her expression. Mathematics is great and powerful, but it isn’t making any of them any happier.

“...Hey. It’s none of my business, but I wouldn’t worry about it. You’ll work it off tomorrow when we hit the beach,” Nath says, only a little awkwardly. She’s conscious that Sham is somebody she _should_ talk to, but so far, they’ve barely exchanged a single word. “Are you feeling any better?”

“Ah… Yeah! Yeah, I’m good. Sorry I’ve been so quiet. Normally I can give anybody a run for their money in the cheerful department, but everything’s happening so fast, you know? It’s like, I’ve only just started getting re-acquainted with Sora, but she’s already inviting me to parties with other ten thousand year old war veterans. That’s super crazy, right? I mean, we’ve got so much to talk about, but I don’t even know where to start,” Sham says. The line at which she passed from ‘talking excitedly’ to ‘babbling’ is hard to pinpoint, but it definitely went by somewhere in the middle. “How did Sora find you?”

“Met me on the street not long after she woke up. She was buying spoons. I thought I’d say hello and then let her just live her life, but she stole my nose and never gave it back, so here I am.”

“That’s, um, wow.” Sham’s expression was very far away from being ‘wow’ and much closer to being ‘are you serious’, but it was the truth. A somewhat truncated version of the truth, but the truth nonetheless.

“What about you?”

“She just turned up at one of my concerts and almost beat up a security guard. Then we hugged and cried a lot. It was a good time!”

Nath smiles. It’s amazing how a quiet, serious girl like Sora can become an erratic lunatic simply by removing a little context from her exploits. “You said you were an idol?”

“Uh-huh. I don’t have a huge fanbase because I take career breaks, and sometimes I have to pretend I died and then I’m a different person, but I’ve made it my mission to encourage peace and love with the loudest voice I can! What do you do?”

She takes a moment to muse over the question. “Hard to say. I used to explore all the post-war ruins for technology, so I guess _maybe_ I was an archaeologist for a while?”

“She was a wandering gourmet as well,” Sora adds helpfully. “Now she has a cat.”

“I wasn’t a ‘wandering gourmet’. I just have good taste in ice cream. And since when is owning a cat an occupation?”

“You can’t just get a cat on a whim. They’re a big responsibility.”

“Just like you, then,” she replies dryly. “How is the cat, anyway?”

“Oh, he’s fine. We dropped him off at a cattery before we left. I can’t believe that’s the first time I’ve seen him – such a charming, rogueish young fellow,” Hime says indulgently. “By the by, did you really name him ‘Nath’s Cat’? That was what Sora booked him under when we dropped him off.”

“I haven’t named him anything, because he’s not my cat. He’s just a stray that lets himself in through the balcony window and licks my eyebrows when I’m trying to sleep.”

“Yes, that’s what we would normally call a ‘pet’. Having actually met him, I really must side with Sora on this – you should give him a name.”

“Oh! I know. It can be a reward,” Sora says, as if struck by a sudden bolt of inspiration. “If I win the swimsuit contest, you have to give him a name.”

“You’re entering a swimsuit contest?” Nath asks, only to be drowned out by Sham asking the same question at the same time but at a very different volume. A volume that, a month ago, might have done some serious structural damage to the house.

Hime titters. “Oh, my. You both got so excited by the idea. How very straightforward of you. But I believe she means the contest to _buy_ the best swimsuit, not who looks the best with one on.”

“Don’t lump us together like that,” Nath replies, scowling. She turns her gaze to Sora. “Anyway, you had a contest?”

“Mm. I took them out with me to buy your swimsuit, but Hime wanted to make it a contest. So we all got you one, and you have to tell us whose is the best.”

Nath’s heart sinks. Sham is an unknown variable, but she’s sure at least that Hime is going to use the ‘contest’ as pretext for pranks of a questionable nature. But she can’t say no outright, since they spent money on it. “Fine. But I’ve got some ground rules. First,” and this is where she’d start ticking things off on her fingers if she had had them long enough for that to be habitual, “I’m not trying on anything if I don’t like it. It doesn’t matter how much you whine about it, or who’s doing the whining.” She’s pleased to see to smile begin to slip from Hime’s face. It feels as though she’s dodged a bullet, but in her experience, bullets come in packs, and she has a few more to divert before she’s done. “Second, if you’re going to make me pick a winner, then no complaining about who I pick. The winner is the winner, and it doesn’t matter how biased I am.” This earns her a pout from Sham; only Sora, who has the same impassive expression as usual, seems unaffected. “Lastly, I don’t negotiate with terrorists, so I’m not budging on any of the rules, and I reserve the right to make new ones if they’re necessary.”

“No budging? Not even for a girl who’s cooked you breakfast and laughs at your jokes?” Hime asks, fluttering her eyelashes. “Not even for Big Sis Sora, who’s taken such good care of your cat? Not even for the guest of honour, Auntie Sham?”

Sham’s face drains of all colour, like a timelapse art video played in reverse. “A-auntie?! I’m not _that_ old!” she says, balling her fists in the sleeves of her hoodie and flailing her arms.

Hime’s smile returns, as merciless as ever. “Well, you _are_ the second oldest person in this room, and probably on Earth.” She raises her shoulders in a non-commital shrug, opens her palms in supplication. “Ah, but that’s not a bad thing. It just means you’re a mature woman with a lot of life experience.”

“Ignore her,” Sora says gently, tugging on Sham’s sleeve. “She’s too young to know any better.” She turns and looks at Hime with baleful eyes. “Respect your elders.” Hime’s mouth opens to retort, an “Or what?” already on her lips, but she wisely closes it again. ‘Or what?’ is not a question you ever ask Sora, because she _will_ have an answer and it _will_ involve lasers. Certain things are better left unsaid, especially to ex-soldiers with a less less-than-civilian attitude to discipline.

“Well, if I’m honest, Suguri is probably the only one out of all of you that I’d call a responsible adult. Speaking of… she’s been awhile.” Nath frowns. The house is a decent size, but it’s only got one floor. Hardly big enough to get lost in, even if you did have Suguri’s apparently infamous inability to navigate.

“Ah… if I had to guess, she may have gone to sleep. We had to get her up very early in the morning to make all the travel arrangements, you see.” She purses her lips. “I _did_ give her extra hugs as fuel, but I suppose even that can’t beat her circadian rhythm.”

Nath rolls her eyes. “Try coffee next time.”

“Yes, well. I’ll go and see if she’s asleep, and pick up the swimsuits. I shan’t be a moment.”

She trots off, leaving the three to themselves. Almost immediately, the silence thickens. With Hime gone, the count is two very quiet people to a lone, lively Sham; she simply can’t uphold a conversation for very long in the face of so much stillness. She wanders over to the coffee table and sinks down on a cushion to wait. To her very great surprise, Nath sits stiffly on the cushion next to hers.

“So.” Nath’s voice is slow, almost a drawl, as if she’s somehow apprehensive. “I hear you’re into robots. Old or new tech?”

A flame of passion bursts into life inside her heart, and the words begin to tumble easily from her mouth. “Old, of course! Not that I don’t like new tech, but nowadays robots all seem really sleek and fragile, right?! But robots are meant to be big and chunky. That’s their charm point! I really want something I can just smack with a wrench or a chair or something and know it’ll be fine, you know?” She punches her palm and lets the sound ring out through the living room. “And it’s super fun to maintain them, too! You get your pliers and your toothbrush and your industrial sander and you just go to town. Buff the dents out, try to scoop the glitter out of the vents, throw on a new coat of paint… you can just get immersed in it and turn your brain off. It’s a bit like making one of those model aeroplanes, right?”

“…Right,” Nath agrees. She’s never made a model aeroplane before, and honestly has no intention to do so. They seem… fiddly. She’s going to have to embrace a whole world full of fiddly things sooner or later, but that’s a journey she’s going to take one step at a time. “I don’t suppose you know anything about N-83 connector ports?”

“N-83s…? I think I use the old N-80s for my babies back home. But putting that aside, that’s a super specific question! Could it be that you’re a robot fan as well?!”

It isn’t Nath that answers, but Sora. “Mm. I think her prosthetics count as robotic.” She throws down a cushion between them and slots herself onto it so they’re shoulder to shoulder to shoulder, with her in the middle. “I think she should get the one with boosters in so she can do rocket punches.”

“I don’t need rocket punches. Tell you what – if I need something punched at long range, I’ll tell you and you can do it for me,” Nath says gently, ruffling Sora’s hair. She turns to Sham. “I don’t know too much about robots, but N-83s are the connector ports in my arms. They have some incompatibilities with modern tech, so I’ve been looking for documentation so I can get prosthetics to match them. These ones are a good attempt, but… the impulse transmission is slow, so the movement’s a bit stiff.”

“Aw… but that stiff, clunky movement is so cute, don’t you think? I mean, I guess I could take a look at the connectors for you, and lend you a spare N-80 in case you can figure anything out from that. One of my babies might have to go without an arm, but it’ll be fine.”

“I’ve gone without two for a very long time. It’s not as bad as it seems – sometimes, I prefer not having them.” She pauses. “Well… There are some things they’re good for.” Like feeling sand run between your fingers, or the heft of a wine bottle as you picked it up. Like being able to use tools, quickly and easily, to make a dilapidated house into something better. And, of course –

“Like hugging,” Sora says seriously.

“Like hugging,” she agrees.

The discussion is broken up when Hime trots back into the room, with an apology for taking as long as she did. Sora and Sham’s cases, she maintains, are an absolute disaster area. Nath shakes her head in disbelief; whatever Sham’s case might be like, she’s sure that Sora packed hers exactly the same way as they taught her in the army – quickly, orderly, ready to go at a moment’s notice. The more likely explanation is that the blonde guardian took a moment to enjoy her partner’s sleeping face, and the moment stretched into minutes without her realising.

“Well, whatever the case may be,” Hime says, adeptly turning the conversation back to the matter at hand, “I’m quite excited for this. We kept our choices secret from each other as well, so I’m in the dark as to what Sham and Sora picked. It ought it be quite educational.” She puts the three bags on the coffee table, so Nath can more easily glare at them. “Mine is the one in the silver wrapping, Sora’s is in the green, and I believe Sham’s is the sky blue.”

She looks the bags over for a second more, before reaching for the silver one. She wants the bad news first. Without nothing that approaches ceremony, she opens the bag and extracts the swimsuit within.

To her surprise, it isn’t _awful_. If she’s honest, she was expecting something more… dramatic. Something like two strands of neon-red dental floss and some tiddlywinks counters levels of dramatic. But, while calling Hime’s offering low-cut would be an understatement, it still vaguely fits into the category of functional clothing items. The bottom half, though, is _definitely_ a thong, and Nath has no patience for thongs. They get wedged into places, which is a major negative if you don’t have fingers to dig them out with. It’s also pink, which is very much not Nath’s colour. It’s a fine colour, but it’s not hers.

“So?” Hime asks.

She thinks for a moment. It’s not something she would wear, but it’s not bad enough that she has to be undiplomatic about it. “…It’s a little daring, don’t you think?”

“Well, yes. You strike me as a woman with little to fear,” Hime says, with a wry smile. “To be entirely honest with you, I would be a little reluctant to wear something like that myself. Perhaps I would consider it, if I had the right audience, and she asked particularly nicely.” Her eyes flicker, half-deliberately, towards the room where Suguri is sleeping. “At any rate, I thought Sham or Sora would pick you out something modest. So I decided to get you something to help catch the attention of that ‘special somebody’, and help you keep it there.” She stops just short of implying who the ‘special somebody’ might be. Nath sighs.

“Well… I suppose I can give you a four out of ten. For effort.”

“How very charitable.”

With Hime’s offering out of the way, she begins to relax a little. Maybe she was judging the spacefaring guardian a little too harshly, anyway, but she was definitely the one person who might take a swimsuit contest into weird places in the name of fun. With a newfound sense of security, she reaches for Sham’s bag.

For a second, she doesn’t quite understand what she withdraws from it. It’s not really beachwear – more of a navy blue leotard. It’s only when she sees ‘Class 7a’ printed on the chest that she realises what she’s holding, and drops it as if it were a live snake.

“Is this a school swimsuit?” she asks Sham, with furrowed brows.

“Of course!” Sham declares, her voice booming, an excited smile plastered across her face. “When I thought about it, I realised it was the only possible option! What else can give you the maximum possible coverage while still being titillating? What’s easy to wear and easy to clean, with no chance of an on-stage wardrobe malfunction? What lets you show off your long legs but still emphasises the bust?! It’s an idol’s secret weapon! And with a body like yours, it’s gonna be nothing less than dynamite! There’s no person on Earth who isn’t in your strike zone! The entire beach is going to be drooling for you!”

“It’s a private beach,” Nath says, dryly. “You four are going to be the only other people there.”

“Even so! Using my years of experience, I’ve bravely selected the optimum swimsuit tailored for you! And the best thing is, it even works if you’re lacking self-confidence! In fact, if you’re embarrassed, it only makes your moe points go up!” Sham declares, and for a moment looks like she’s going to mount the coffee table to deliver even more rousing oratory. “This… is the essence of swimwear!”

“The problem is that I’m not fourteen. I’m not even fourteen _hundred_. This is a three out of ten, and if the speech wasn’t so passionate, the score would have been even worse.” She turns to Sora, looks at her with imploring eyes. “ _Please_ tell me you got me something normal. _Please._ ”

Sora, feeling the gaze of all three women on her, tilts her head. “Muuu. I feel bad about it, since Hime and Sham were so creative. But I couldn’t figure out what to get you,” she says quietly. “…So I just got you the same one as mine.”

With hands that would probably have trembled had they been made of flesh and bone, Nath snatches up Sora’s bag and quickly opens it. What she finds makes her heart soar – a two-piece swimsuit with a modest cut, in a shade of powder blue that’s perhaps still a _little_ too cutesy for her tastes, but perfectly serviceable. There’s a sarong folded neatly in the bottom of the bag, just in case she wants to cover up a little more. Even the hook for the bikini top is in the front, so she doesn’t have to fiddle about behind her back with her clumsy prosthetic fingers. It’s perfect, or about as close as she can expect without subjecting herself to a trip to the lingerie department. Sora gazes at her with big green eyes, waiting patiently for her judgement.

“I’ll name the cat when we get home,” she says, and Sora and Hime erupt in a quiet cheer. “I was getting a little scared that I’d have nothing to wear, but I should have known I could count on you.”

“Oh, but of course. Despite her attitude, Sora _is_ our dependable big sister, after all,” Hime says, giggling. “Although I _do_ think the judge was very biased indeed.”

“I made rule two for a reason.”

The only one who doesn’t seem happy is Sham, whose frown looks almost comical on her face. “Gumumu… Even with all my years of swimsuit experience… Even though I deployed the Idol’s Secret Weapon… I still came in last… Muuu… Any way you look at it, such a plain swimsuit is a waste on somebody with such formidable measurements…”

“It’s because you didn’t use the secret ingredient,” Sora explains sagely. “Love.”

“That’s for food. As talented as Sham might be, I rather doubt she _baked_ Nath a swimsuit. Although I’m sure a shortbread bikini would be a revolutionary prospect, I don’t think it would be particularly water-resistant.”

“That’s because shortbread is weird. It’s a biscuit but it pretends to be bread. You can’t trust it.”

As the debate about what the best biscuit bikini would be moves into full swing, Nath leans back and smiles. This is the liveliest this house has been in centuries. She feels as though having friends here does more for these walls than all the decorating and plastering she did before they arrived.

Eventually, the conversation cools, and Hime motions for bedtime. As she slips beneath the sheets and hears Sora’s breath begin to get slower and snufflier as she drops off, she finds herself looking forward to tomorrow – to having fun on the beach, and then showing her friends the soldier’s memorial that she built. It isn’t long before she feels like she’s drifting off herself.

In the darkness, Sham’s eyes snap open. But Nath isn’t awake to see them.


	36. Beach Party (III)

She can’t sleep.

Her mind is tired, but her body is restless. On edge. She’s not used to other people being in the room when she’s asleep; even Sora’s soft, snuffling breaths are enough to jolt her from her drowsiness. She slips away for a half hour, an hour, and then wakes again, endlessly. Frustrated, she rolls over, the bedsprings creaking ominously under her weight; she feels sweat gathering under the collar of her pyjama shirt, newly bought just for tonight. Too many new things, people, sensations. Too little wine.

“…So. What was the matter this morning?”

Her skin prickles as she hears a voice float softly in from the kitchen. It is a moment before she can place the warm, calm tones as Suguri’s. There’s the sound of a long sip, then a cup being carefully put down on the coffee table.

“Ahaha… I didn’t mean to make such a big deal out of it, it was just–” Light, cheery. Perhaps a little artificially so. Sham’s voice. But it is deeper and softer than it was yesterday, with less high strung energy, and more richness. More depth. “I was sorta wrong-footed, you know?”

There’s a slow, lingering silence. The cup is picked up, sipped from, put down. Suguri speaks. “…Let’s say I don’t know. Talk to me about it.”

A beat passes; perhaps Sham is thinking. About how much she wants to say. What she wants to reveal. Or whether she wants to reveal anything at all. But Suguri’s voice has an authority to it; gentle, yes, but irresistible nonetheless. Sometimes, she speaks like a child. But sometimes, she speaks like a prince, or a king, like the planet’s wise regent who only wants the best for the world she surveys.

“Well, I mean… I just wasn’t expecting them to… you know. Hug. Like that.”

“Ah.” Suguri’s voice is warm, with just a hint of amusement. “Sorry. That’s something we do.” Another long sip. “Hime and I enjoy our hugs. We’ve probably influenced Sora a little.” She pauses. “And Nath, come to think of it.”

It’s difficult, but she manages to avoid snorting when she hears that. It’s probably true, but a little too on the nose not to laugh at.

“It’s not that they _hugged_. It’s the _way_ they hugged.” A small, anxious pause. “I mean, I’m an idol, right? I sing the goofy, sappy songs that people fall in love to. And I can tell you, that wasn’t a friendly kind of hug. That was a ticking timebomb hug. A ‘when, not if’ kind of hug. I didn’t know… how to react to that, I guess.”

She feels herself stiffen. No. She doesn’t want to hear this. She doesn’t want to think about this. As quietly as she can, she shifts her body in the bed so she can peek at the floor, where Sora set up her sleeping bag between Sham and Nath. In the half-light, the blonde girl’s eyes are closed, her eyelids fluttering as she dreams. There’s no change in her breathing to signal she’s awake. That’s something to be relieved about, at least.

She turns back over to face the wall, suddenly more awake, more alert, than she’s been in months. A ticking timebomb. When, not if. Is that what they look like? Is that what they _are_? The questions that run through her head are ones she’s been trying not to ask herself for a long time now. She waves them away as best she can, prickles under the unspoken weight of them. She’ll think about it later. Next week. Next month. Next year. Later.

“I see,” Suguri says. Her heart sinks. She was _hoping_ Suguri would tell Sham it was nothing. That she was imagining it, reading too deeply into two friends reuniting.

“But it’s not _just_ the hug.” Sham’s voice sounds sullen now. Childish. “Have you noticed how they act? When they’re in a room, they lean towards each other. If they’re not looking at anything else, they’re looking at each other. It’s like neither of them realises it. Like magnetism. That’s not something friends do. Not like that.”

Even as she lays silent in her bed, she denies the accusation to herself. Lean towards each other? She hasn’t noticed it at all. If she’s leaning, it’s because her back hurts. And as for how her gaze falls so often on Sora… well, what else is there to look at? Is she supposed to stare longingly at her own ceiling, rake her eyes across the stucco walls? Sora at least _does_ things. And even when she doesn’t do things, looking at her is… restful, somehow. Like watching a cat. It doesn’t mean anything. Or at least, it doesn’t have to.

Suguri puts her cup down on the table again. There’s a long pause before she speaks.

“Are you jealous?”

Are you crazy? How blunt can you be? she thinks, faintly horrified on Sham’s behalf. Not even Hime would get away with asking a question like that. She’s sure that any second now, Sham will get offended, or deny it–

“Of course I am!” There it is: a note of urgency in her voice, the sound of an emotional undertow being dragged to the surface. “How could I not be? I spent–” Her voice hitches – “–for ten thousand years, I looked after Sora. I worried and I cried and I hoped for her. I made her a part of my life. But now she’s awake, I’m the person who’s had the least time with her. Out of anybody. And in the time I wasn’t there, those two got that close!” She sniffles. “It’s not… it isn’t fair.”

This is painful to listen to. She has a sudden, deep desire to burrow into her bedding, put her pillow over her ears and block it all out. But she knows that not hearing it, and wondering what was said, would be so much worse. The knowledge doesn’t make her any less uncomfortable.

“And you know what else isn’t fair? How they met. To just meet on the street, not long after Sora finally woke up… That’s fate, right? I can guarantee one of them’s thought about that at some point. Probably both of them. And how did Sora find me? I popped up in a search engine,” she says, her voice bitter in the last words. “How am I supposed to compete with that?”

“For the record,” Suguri says, evenly, “the moment she saw you in a video, she recognised you. She dropped everything to try and find you. If we hadn’t made her wait, she would have flown out of the house, crashed your concert and probably put your security team in hospital. We had to argue with her. We don’t usually argue with her. Ever.”

Sham sniffles. “Okay. Well, that’s a little better. But it’s not destiny.”

The air is still a few moments more; for a second, she thinks – hopes – the conversation will peter out, that Sham and Suguri will return to their beds and leave the subject alone. But her hopes are in vain; Suguri speaks once more, still warmly but with obvious caution. “You seem to be thinking about Sora in… well. A romantic sense. It might not be my place to say it, but… Isn’t it a little soon? You’ve barely had any time together.”

Sham takes a deep breath, sighs. Fingers drum on the coffee table.

“It is,” she says, very slowly, “but it isn’t. If you were around somebody for ten thousand years, but you never dated or anything, wouldn’t you be a little curious what it would be like? To kiss them, or hold hands with them, or just be around them? I’ve always… wondered. What kind of a couple we would be. Even if it didn’t work out, I wanted to at least have the opportunity, you know?” She breathes deeply, heavily. “But I don’t… think I have that. Because of one year, one year that Nath’s had against ten thousand of mine… I don’t think I have a chance. If Nath were a normal human, I wouldn’t even feel bad about it. She’d die in a hundred years or so, and eventually I might have another chance. There’d be hope. But…” She sighs, deeply. “I guess I’m just complaining because I can’t change anything.”

“…It’s not hopeless. You and Sora get along well,” Suguri says, non-committally. “She and Nath might not think about each other that way… there are a lot of potential outcomes.” A few steps, and the sound of running water. A cup being washed out. The kettle clicking on. “Coffee?”

“N-no, I’m fine. I’ll be heading back to bed after this anyway…” Sham says, and giggles nervously. “Say… Would you mind? If I dated Sora?”

The question hangs in the air for a while as Suguri considers her answer, or considers how she wants to phrase it. The sound of grains of sugar falling against the sides of her cup, milk being taken out of the fridge.

“I don’t mind,” she says, cautiously, “so long as whoever Sora dates makes her happy. Whether it’s you, or anybody else.”

“I see… ehehehe. Thanks, Suguri. I… feel a lot better having got it off my chest, you know? Now I can go out tomorrow and enjoy the beach to its fullest! I won’t give up… just because Nath got a head start, doesn’t mean I can’t swoop in and steal the victory!”

“Hey. Don’t talk about it like you’re fighting for her,” Suguri says, quiet but reproachful. “No matter what the cause, it’s no good for friends to be fighting in earnest.”

Footsteps on a wooden floor. Through one half-open eye, Nath can see Sham’s shadow in the doorway. She rolls over again as quietly as she can.

“That’s the thing about love and peace,” Sham’s voice says, much closer now. Her tone is remorseful, a little sour. “Sometimes, you can only have one or the other. Goodnight, Suguri. Thanks for hearing me out.”

She hears bedsprings shifting as Sham settles down in the bed opposite hers, the sound of the blankets being rearranged as she gets comfortable. Eventually, silence, broken only by Sora’s breathing, the kettle boiling, and her own thoughts echoing inside her head.

What is Sora to her? What… what does she want Sora to be? She’s avoided thinking about it for so long, because she’s afraid of what the answer might be. For a long time, she was content to think that her relationship with Sora was its own thing, to be explored over months, years, decades. Now, suddenly, there is a time limit. An outside element forcing her hand, and also quietly snoring five feet away.

She closes her eyes, knowing that she will be awake again in an hour and a half, and that the same thoughts will be waiting to greet her. The last thing she hears before she drops off into a restless sleep is water being poured into a cup, and Suguri’s voice saying softly in the distance:

“How troublesome.”

* * *

 

She’s being stupid, and she knows it. But knowing it and stopping it are two very different things.

Spread out on the bed is the swimsuit that Sora gave her, and, no matter how she looks at it, it’s just right. Not too showy, easy to put on, the right kind of colour, the works. But, she thinks, didn’t Sora say that it matched hers? Certainly, Sora’s own swimsuit is the same kind of colour and material. Probably even the same brand. But Sora’s has a different shape, like a high-necked sports bra. Hers is a much more traditional bikini cut. The cut is modest, yes, but there’s still a certain plunge to the neckline, an attention paid to cleavage in potentia. She wonders to herself if Sora meant anything by that. Of course, there are a thousand innocent explanations, but can she bring herself to believe any of them?

Laid out next to it is Hime’s offering, which is still very, very pink and very, very sparing on the coverage. She doesn’t even know why she took it out. Or why she’s looking at it. Or why she’s more and more tempted to put it on. It wouldn’t be practical at all, she tells herself. They’re meant to have fun in the sun, and that probably means swimming, or volleyball, or running around on the beach firing lasers at each other. Wearing this kind of swimsuit to any kind of vigorous activity is asking for a disaster. Like fine art, this kind of clothing should be admired at a distance. If possible, while still on the clothes rack.

But there is a small, treacherous part of her that looks at it, and thinks back to what Hime said yesterday. ‘ _Something to catch the attention of a special somebody_ ’. Her motivations might be dubious, but it can’t be denied that Hime Knows Things, and the Things that she Knows have been proven to work, at least on Suguri. Sora and Suguri are in many ways alike.

Eventually, she gives a final, stubborn shake of her head and starts to slip out of her pyjamas. She can’t waste time forever. The others are already waiting for her at the beach. All she needs is a swimsuit she can have fun in. She allows all the other concerns to float away as she begins to fiddle with straps and ties.

As she walks out of the house towards the beach, she spies the discarded husks of two inflatable beach balls, and hears very loud voices in the distance. It seems the fun has already begun.

“…it’ll be fine, alright? If you keep your shield generator that high, it’ll pop the ball every time!”

“Muu. I like keeping it on in case there’s a surprise attack. Just don’t hit me with the ball.”

“Heh heh. It doesn’t matter how high your shield generator is, you’re still vulnerable to the most dangerous type of attack – a tickle attack!”

She arrives just in time to see Sham, clad in her very own school swimsuit, advancing on Sora with her hands out and fingers wriggling. So, she does not miss the look of surprise on her face when Sora slips behind her, grabs her by the belly and suplexes her into the sand in a single, efficient motion. As the sand clears, she sees Sora absent-mindedly pondering whether to follow up with an armbar, before her wide green eyes snap to Nath’s face.

“Oh,” she says, her eyes flicking to several parts of Nath that are very much not her face. Mainly the bits not covered in bikini. “You look good,” she says, after a moment of intense consideration.

“Ah.” Her voice sounds more uncertain that she wants it to. She reaches down, coaxes the warmth from her vocal cords and into her words. “Thank you. You do, too.”

She’s hit by the realisation that she would have said that pretty much regardless of what Sora was wearing. But that’s not to say that the sentiment is wrong. She had always assumed Sora and Suguri’s choice in clothing was a result of Hime’s intervention, and that deprived of her they would quickly descend into a haze of scruffiness and odd socks. But the swimsuit Sora picked out for herself – for both of them – does a good job of accentuating her finer points while still being practical. The powder blue sports bra is gives her ample support for fun and games while preserving modesty, but in a sense, the way that it clings to her bust might be more alluring than a plunging neckline would have been. The bottoms, too – they’re high waisted, and not particularly revealing, but the way that the fabric sits at the very top of her hips before sweeping down in a smooth curve is hard to ignore. Also hard to ignore is the way that it shows off so much of her midriff, because Sora’s midriff is a rare and valuable commodity.

“Ohoho. Good morning, Nath. I was rather hoping you might give my swimsuit a tiny try, but Sora’s suits you well enough,” Hime says, peering out from a beach umbrella. She and Suguri have set up an outpost at the corner of the beach, out of range of Sora’s wrestling moves and the cold touch of the ocean. “You’re blushing, by the way.”

“I’m not.”

“You’re not,” Suguri confirms. Despite having been up all night, there are no dark circles under her eyes; she looks as fresh and wide-awake as she ever does. She _does_ seem just the tiniest bit embarrassed. Her swimsuit has a few too many ruffles to be taken seriously. “Is Sham okay?”

“She’s okay. We’re playing,” Sora nods, standing up. Sham, Nath thinks, does not seem to be playing; she seems to be counting the stars she can see circling around her head. “Let’s do volleyball,” she says, ambling across the sand towards them on legs that seemed longer and more slender than Nath remembered them.

“Oh, absolutely! You can start whenever you like. Suguri and I will join when we can. We have sunscreen to apply, you see,” Hime says, wearing a smirk that could have been borrowed from a passing shark. Only the brave or the foolish would refuse the hint.

“Suguri doesn’t need sunscreen,” Sora says, because she has seen the end of the world and it has chased the fear of almost everything else out of her. “Neither do I.”

“But I _do_ ,” Hime says sweetly. “And Suguri has very kindly agreed to help me apply it, in lieu of wearing the swimsuit I had first picked out for her.”

A swimsuit which, Nath thinks, probably has about as much fabric as three band-aids. “Yes, well,” she replies carefully. “Compromise is the sign of a happy marriage.” Hime’s smile widens, and becomes just a fraction more gentle – but only a fraction. It makes her no less eager to leave the two guardians to their own devices. She turns to Sora. “Looks like it’ll just be you, me and Sham for a while.” She tries not to look behind her as Suguri is summarily dragged back to the privacy of the beach umbrella. She might be struggling. She might not. No-one will ever know.

“Three isn’t a good number for volleyball,” Sora murmurs, and she is, in fairness, right. Three players means that either one player sits out, or two players gang up on the unlucky lone opponent. Neither lives up to the ideal of fun in the sun that the blonde ex-soldier seems to be cultivating in her heart. Nevertheless, she looks down at Sham, looks up at Nath, and declares: “You two be a team. I’ll face you.”

“...eh? Whuzzat? I’m teaming with Nath?” Sham asks, finally climbing to her feet. There is a certain… thickness to her voice. She’s _probably_ not concussed, but it remains a probability. “Can’t I team up with Sora instead?”

Nath frowns. After overhearing the conversation last night, she can’t read Sham’s suggestion any other way than sheer, naked ambition. She briefly contemplates stepping in to shoot her down, but is relieved when Sora shakes her shaggy head.

“No. Nath’s not good at arms yet. And you don’t do much sport. So it’s more fair for you two to team up against me,” Sora says, and then a glint of cockiness enters her eye. “I can take both of you, no problem.”

“Is that a fact?” Nath asks, arching an eyebrow. It probably is, she thinks privately. But it’s good to indulge in a little competitive spirit from time to time. Sora takes everything seriously, even fun. Especially fun. So sometimes, she needs a serious rival. “Sham and I aren’t pushovers, you know – even if we are at a disadvantage.”

“Yeah! And when we win, we’ll bury you in the sand and stick a flag on top!” Sham declares.

They look at each other, and, for however briefly, an accord is struck. A net is erected, and they shake hands before Sham raises the ball for her first serve – two rivals, setting aside their disagreements to form an uneasy partnership against a formidable opponent.

To say they got destroyed is an understatement.

* * *

“Nath?”

“Mm?”

“What do you think cats dream of?”

Sora’s voice is slow and heavy, as if it’s been dipped in honey. Nath feels that way herself. Being buried in the sand isn’t so bad. It’s warm, after a little while, and it’s easy to let the sound of waves lull her into a deep, bottomless sense of peace.

“I don’t know,” she replies. “We can ask him when we get back.”

“Roger’s your cat, so he probably dreams of you.”

“His name’s not – well. His name’s not Roger _yet_.”

Sora doesn’t giggle, but Nath can tell she’s thinking about giggling, and that’s a tiny victory all by itself.

“I’ve had a couple of cats. Down the years,” Sham says dreamily from Sora’s other side. “They were super cute. Bushy tails and twitchy whiskers, yay!”

They’re buried in the sand together. At first, it was just Nath and Sham, as their penalty for losing so badly at volleyball. But then it apparently looked so fun that Sora wanted to be buried too. Summarily, Hime and Suguri were summoned from their beach umbrella haven, and Sora entombed between her two old friends. Hime gave their burials an artistic touch as well, sculpting the sand around them in whichever way amused her. Nath had been transformed into a macho bodybuilder with massive, sandy biceps. Sora was turned into a sand squid. Sham was a turtle with her head poking out of a sandy shell. They were all more or less happy with the arrangement.

“I wish I were a cat,” Sora says dreamily.

“I wish you were a cat, too,” Sham agrees.

Nath snorts. “You basically already are. Both of you, I think.”

“You should be a cat as well. We could be a happy cat family.”

Neither Nath or Sham respond to this, although with the pacifying sound of the ocean to fill the space, it doesn’t feel awkward. Just contemplative, as if Sora has spoken a great truth and they are meditating upon it. They’re not – at least, Nath thinks she’s not – but it feels that way.

“I like dogs as well, though,” Sham says eventually.

“Oh. I see dogs woofing at me sometimes when I fly around, but I’ve not pet one yet. Are they good?”

“All dogs are good dogs, even if they don’t know it yet.”

“They’re not that bad,” Nath says. Usually, she’s not a fan of dogs, particularly the little ones. They always jump up and bite her sleeves when she’s not wearing her arms, and then she has to just stand there until their jaws get tired and they drop off again. But here, now, warmed by the sun and pacified by the sea, she’s inclined to agree that dogs are Okay, and could be Okay in the future as well.

“We should go swimming later,” Sora says distantly. “And find some dolphins. Suguri told me about meeting dolphin pods when she was cleaning up the oceans. I want to meet some.”

Nath smiles. It’s such a simple ambition. Sora – all of them, in fact – have all the power that the world could ever throw at them, and all they use it for is volleyball and dolphin relations, with the occasional high-powered squabble that gets resolved and quickly forgotten about. They’re living in an enlightened age.

“Actually,” she says, the thought jogging her mind, “I had something else in mind for this afternoon. It’s… important, I think. For you. For both of you.” She nods in Sham’s direction. “Would it be okay to look for dolphins tomorrow?”

“Mm. If it’s important, it’s important,” Sora replies. “...but let’s nap first. You and Sham look tired.”

She grins ruefully. Of course the two people who were up all night look tired, although neither of them is in a position to tell her that. “...You sure?” she asks. “If we got up now, we could at least do a little swimming practice or something. I don’t want to waste your vacation.” It’s a fine thought, but getting up now would be very difficult. The weight of sleep and sand are sitting on her chest.

Sora shakes her head seriously. “Vacation is for resting as well as fun. And napping is fun as well.”

Somewhere beyond her, Sham begins to snore. Nath smiles. It seems she’s been outvoted by the Sleepyhead Party. She turns her head to the side, closes her eyes, and takes some rest herself.

* * *

“Sorry. We’ll be intruding.”

The sunset coats the grove in gold and throws shadows between the headstones as she walks. Sora, Sham, Suguri and Hime follow in her wake, looking up at the spreading ivy and the greenery overhead. Her back is straight, her head held high. There’s not all that much she’s proud of having done, but she’s proud of this.

“This… this is what you could call my _real_ job. Maintaining this place. I built it a long time back, and paid for what I couldn’t do myself,” Nath says. Her voice is warmer, softer than usual. As if she’s surrounded by old friends. “Look around.”

Without questioning, they follow her instructions. The graves are arranged neatly in rank and file, each one carved with name after name, the stones clean and well-kept. Above them there is a canopy of spreading vines, thinned out in places so the sun can drift through and warm the air. The stillness is broken only by the butterflies, wandering from plant to plant, completely unafraid; this is their place, too.

“It’s very picturesque,” Hime says. Her eyes drift lower than the headstones and to the small pockets of blooming colour at the floor, the flowers that have stolen into a sacred place. “Did you do the gardening yourself?”

“No. I’m not much of a gardener. I just come once a year and trim it all back. The flowers do the hard work themselves.”

Suguri listens, nodding. “They do that,” she murmurs, her fingers tracing the worn lettering on one of the graves. She knows what this place is, even without Nath having said it. She recognises some of the names from her data trawls, from her long research into the calamity that befell the world. That she helped repair.

“Ah… Is this… what I think it is?”

Sham’s voice trembles. She, too, has begun to recognise some of the names here, dredged up from her distant memories. But they’re not points of data for her. They’re old heroes, temporary friends, disappeared rivals. They were people she knew, idolised, hated, loved. Her hand comes up to her chest.

“…Yes. It’s a memorial for the fallen soldiers of the Great War.” She walks, step by step, to the great marble slab, the collection of names. “Sora, Sham. I wanted to show you this. More than anything.” Her voice is steady. She refuses to let it crack. Some things need to be said, and said clearly. “To show that they’re being remembered, even now. All these people gave their lives. They gave them for good reasons. For bad reasons. For reasons that didn’t make sense. But they gave them.” She pauses. She doesn’t know quite what she’s getting at. “I think… it’s important,” she finishes, a little lamely.

Sora has said nothing, and says nothing still. But she stands beside her at the marble slab, and, very slowly, as if her body has forgotten the motion, touches her hand to her head in a salute. On Nath’s other side, Sham follows suit. Finally, Nath does as well, hoping she’s getting it right; she never had arms to practice with during the war.

“Ah…” Sham says, when Sora has lowered her hand and the moment is over. Her voice is chocked with emotion. “Thanks, Nath. For this. You ever… um… you ever had that feeling that you needed something real bad, but you didn’t know until you got it?” She sniffs in such a way that even Nath knows she’s going to cry later, when she’s alone. “There’s names here I haven’t thought about in forever.”

“Mm. This is a good place,” Sora murmurs. “I don’t know a lot of the names. But they must be happy to sleep in a place like this.” She turns, her stride suddenly businesslike. “Hime. Can we go looking for wildflowers tomorrow? I want to make a wreath.”

“Well, certainly, but… if we do that, you won’t have time to find dolphins, you know?”

“Dolphins can wait.”

Nath smiles as they say their goodbyes to the grove. She finds herself smiling more often than not, lately. There’s still a whole lot left to be done, and thought about. Her relationship with Sora, and what she wants from it. Sham – what her feelings are, and how to understand her. And, of course, she needs to ask them both if they’ll look after this place when she’s gone. There’s a lot left undone.

But a lot has been accomplished, too. She’ll be able to walk forwards tomorrow and have as much fun as she can, with a clear conscience and a refreshed mind. And, if she works hard enough when they’re gathering flowers, there might be time for dolphins after all.


	37. Sufficiency

Suguri, as a rule, did not have bad days, or at least didn’t remember having any. That was the thing about being old; individual episodes of misfortune were eventually subsumed within the amorphous soup of time, until it felt like luck was simply something that didn’t affect you. If you left the graph running long enough, it all became a straight line eventually. But now that Hime and Sora had entered her life, she was having good days with greater and greater frequency – which meant she was due some bad days to balance it out.

Today had the makings of a bad day. She wrinkled her nose, and quietly inspect what  _had_  been a rasher of bacon and was now a smear of pure carbon that had been atomically bonded to the base of her frying pan. How did Hime cook this so often, she wondered, and so well? Was her precious companion secretly some kind of pork wizard, a bacon elemental who could bend cured meat to her will?

Sadly, it was a question she would never receive an answer to. The entire reason she had thrown on her apron and sacrificed a slice of meat to the cooking gods was because she had woken up this morning to a note, penned in Hime’s elegant hand:

_My dear Suguri,_

_Seeing Nath’s memorial the other day reminded me of something I really should check up on, so I shall be away for a few days. I shan’t be doing anything too dangerous, so don’t fret. Just consider this your own personal vacation from my constant teasing! Take good care of Sora while I’m away, or vice versa._

_Thinking of you always,_

_Hime_

Suguri did not, especially, desire a break from Hime’s teasing. She actually quite enjoyed it, although she was dimly aware that a time would come when their relationship would progress from cuddles and soft, slow kisses every morning to a more adult and physical relationship, which vaguely terrified her.  

Setting that matter well aside, she scraped a layer of black soot out of the frying pan and dunked it in the sink to soak. Bacon, she had decided, was treacherous. Arrogant, too. Anything that had the nerve to burst into fire right in front of her eyes was definitely up to something. It certainly wasn’t trustworthy breakfast material, at least not without Hime to tame it. There had to be an alternative.

Half an hour later, she and Sora were both staring into two bowls of suspiciously colourful wheat circles, drowned in approximately half an ocean of milk. Increasing the amount of milk decreased the ratio of potentially radioactive children’s cereal per bowl of breakfast, and that was an important ratio to consider. Slowly, the colours from the cereal were beginning to spread across the milk’s surface, like an oil spill slowly spreading out on the sea.

“Are you sure the bacon is broken?” Sora asked.

“The bacon,” Suguri said gravely, “is most definitely broken.”

There was a brief pause for more staring. Suguri wondered if breakfast cereal technically counted as a soup, and if it did, how primordial the soup was supposed to be. She was almost one hundred percent sure the cereal was not alive, but that little nagging ‘almost’ was enough to halt her spoon. Still, she was supposed to be the one who took the first bite. She had regenerative abilities in case anything went horribly wrong, and Sora didn’t.

“What about toast?”

“No bread.”

“Bread is gettable. We can get it.” Sora put her palms on the table and stood up. “Let’s go on a bread hunting mission.”

Suguri took one last look at her breakfast soup, and then nodded. Bread was easy enough. They could even get croissants. She did like a good croissant, although she had never managed to eat them gracefully. Hime had evolved a rare talent for eating croissants without a single flake of pastry either touching the floor or getting stuck to her mouth, and if Suguri was honest it was maybe the one thing in the world that made her mad. No one woman should have that much power, even if it was Hime and even if she fluttered her eyelashes every time she ate one.

“We have to hurry, though. I’m meeting Sham today. She’s doing a show in a city and it’s got an aquarium.” Sora’s large, green eyes were completely unreadable. “They don’t have dolphins, but they have lots of tortoises.”

Suguri looked at her, and knew that the chance she wouldn’t want to ride around on the back of a sufficiently large tortoise was zero percent. She would never actually do it, because no such tortoise existed and she would worry about hurting it, but in an ideal world, Sora would ride everywhere on a giant tortoise and become an unflinching ally of testudines the world over. There was no other possibility that existed.

But, now that she thought about it, a trip to an aquarium was definitely a date, wasn’t it? It certainly would be to Sham. She wondered if she should… well, she didn’t know. Dispense some kind of sagely romantic advice? She did technically have more life experience. What would Hime say in this situation?

“…Always use protection,” she mumbled.

“Hm? I always have my shield running,” Sora replied, tilting her head. “Anyway, I’m going to borrow Hime’s camera and take lots of pictures.”

“Of you and Sham?”

“Of fish. I want to show them to Roger.”

Suguri scratched her head. If Sham felt threatened by how affectionate Sora was with Nath, then she didn’t even want to imagine how jealous she might be of Nath’s cat. Actually, she wouldn’t be surprised if Nath herself was jealous of that cat. (She knew for sure that Sora and Hime were both jealous of the cat, because, well, he had the good fortune of being born a cat, and they didn’t.)

“Take some of you and Sham, too,” she said after a moment’s pause. “And some that Hime will like. You can show her when she gets back.”

“Mm. I think Hime would like penguins. If they had sharks I think Nath would like them, but I don’t think it’s that kind of aquarium.” She threw a glance at the window, noted the colour of the light. Frowned slightly. “Suguri, let’s hurry.”

A little while later, Suguri waved as Sora trotted away from the bakery, carrying a bag laden with croissants that she had promised would not, under any circumstances, find themselves in the eager beaks of the penguin enclosure. Even if they all stood in a line and quacked at her, which apparently was the sound Sora thought penguins made. The only question facing Suguri now was what to do with the rest of her day. Normally, that was a question Hime would answer in some way, shape or form.

But then, she thought, she did have several days’ worth of crossword puzzles to catch up on. She took a great amount of pleasure in fitting more words in than the puzzle was designed to accommodate, primarily by writing her letters very small. It was the anti-authoritarian streak she would never admit she had. With just the smallest smile, she went home to indulge it.

* * *

“… _So she burst into my apartment and spent the next hour showing pictures of fish to my cat.”_  

Suguri cradled the phone with her shoulder, and wondered what she should say. Nath did not sound amused. Well, okay, she sounded like she was trying not to be amused and failing just a tiny bit, but still.

“Did he like them?” she tried.

“ _He’s a cat.”_ A few seconds of silence.  _“…I guess he did sit there and look at them all with her. And he purred a bit. But he’s a cat. Do cats even understand photographs?”_

“It’s not impossible.”

“ _Then she gave me a postcard of a shark. There weren’t any sharks at the aquarium. She just got it for me because she thought I wanted to see one.”_

“That was considerate of her.”

“ _Anyway, the cat went to sleep on her, so she went to sleep as well. I guess she’s staying over for the night.”_

“I see. I hope it’s not too inconvenient.”

A moment of silence.  _“Well… I’m never_ _ **not**_ _happy to see her, I suppose. She makes life interesting.”_

It sounded like faint praise, and perhaps it was. But Nath was an ancient, just like Suguri. She would know, without a doubt, the truth of what she’d said. Anybody who made life interesting – who made the days worth counting, the world worth getting out of bed for – was precious beyond measure.

A ticking timebomb. That was what Sham had called them. She might have been right.

“Glad to hear it. Hime’s out of town at the moment, so if you could keep Sora company, I’d appreciate it.” Suguri let a few seconds elapse. Pretended to think. “You know, I think there’s a zoo near Port City.”

“ _I think there’s a moon near Jupiter as well.”_ Suguri had never known anybody that could audibly roll their eyes, but Nath was making a valiant attempt.  _“Well. Even if the delivery wasn’t great, the hint is good. She does seem to like animals.”_

They exchanged a few more pleasantries before Nath said her goodbyes and put the phone down. Neither of them were phone people, so an extended conversation was out of the question. She regretted that, a little. When she thought about it, she realised that, even though they had a lot in common, she and Nath didn’t actually tend to talk that much if Sora or Hime weren’t there to act as catalysts. Perhaps she’d been relying on them too much. It was an uncomfortable thing to think about. She’d always considered herself a very self-sufficient person, but perhaps she ought to be working harder.

She set the phone down on its charger, and went to get ready for bed. She took a shower, even though her hair was a pain to wash, and came out smelling like Hime’s strawberry body scrub. When she slipped beneath the covers, she slept not in the middle of the bed, but the side which had become hers. She took one of the pillows from the wall long demolished, and snuggled it against her as she tried to get comfortable. For the first time in what felt like a long time, the house filled up with the same deathly silence it had before Hime had arrived. And – just a little, in the very bottom of her heart – she felt lonely.

But that was fine. It just reminded her to treasure what she had. Tomorrow, she wasn’t going to feel lonely. She was going to wake up, bright and early, go down to the kitchen table, and , one by one, call her friends. She was going to listen to Saki ramble about baking, and humour Nana when she complained. She was going to ask Sham about the aquarium, and try to strike up a genuine conversation with Nath. Most importantly, she was going to take the frying pan out of soak, dust off her ego, and finally learn the ways of bacon.


	38. Sisters

If Hime was disappointed about anything, it was the lack of fire. It just didn’t look right without any, in her opinion. Oh, she knew that it had been a year or more since the spaceship crashed, but in her mind’s eye she had still pictured a _little_ burning. She had even brought marshmallows, and foraged a stick to toast them on. There was nothing like a toasted marshmallow to keep one’s spirits up as you traipsed around the wreckage of your old home.

There were plenty of places where fire _had_ been, though, great senseless sculptures of blackened metal and warped support beams. Rocket fuel burned so very hot. She probably knew exactly how hot, to the degree, if she were to trawl her memory, but it wasn’t important. Humanity would probably never again dare to venture out into the stars; when they had fled, in the Great War, the Earth had been blacker and less hospitable than even space. Now it was green, comfortable, welcoming. The settlers had come home – not to _quite_ the welcome they had expected to receive, but still.

All in all, though, the _Sumika_ had stood up to the impact and the fighting quite admirably. Most of the internal structures were still stable, if unappealing, and the bulkheads had barely a scratch on them – which was irritating, really, since it meant she had to stop every so often and cut through them, working with one of Suguri’s borrowed laser swords for minutes at a time. Some of them, she knew, had had beam repellent shielding installed by Shifu when he began dreaming of planetary conquest; those she tried to route around, often going through the walls instead. In space, or even in the sky, the sudden depressurization would have been dangerous or fatal, but at rest, it made it easy it skip through the larger part of the ship.

The ship itself had been large, of course. Anything built to sustain a decent human population had to be. There had to be systems to provide food, water, and air; exercise and entertainment facilities, to prevent atrophy of the mind and body; wide open spaces and solitary nooks, to promote mental health. On the occasions where any one of those things broke down, the ship had turned from a habitat into a prison. If they had stayed broken, it very quickly would have become a coffin. She didn’t even the technicians, who were told that there would be no spare parts, no replacements; everything must be recycled, re-used. Every scrap of metal, every scrap of food. Every nut, bolt, and seed, every drop of water. Sometimes they had managed to harvest comets or even planets to supplement what they had, but it was a rarity, and the philosophy remained – even in her. If Suguri and Sora noticed that she always cleans her plate, no matter how poor the fare, they have said nothing about it.

(In fact, Suguri had largely the same attitude. Sora, born in an era where the Earth’s resources were still being burned through at an astounding rate to fuel to engines of war, was less concerned about recycling, but a military upbringing had at least bred efficiency into her. She rarely took more than she needed.)

As she drew closer to the core, the signs of destruction began to fade. The shielding on the core, naturally, was at its strongest; if it wasn’t, Suguri might well have had another environmental disaster on her hands when the ship made landfall. Most of the systems seemed to have been preserved as well. She could _feel_ the network responding to her wavelength, welcoming its Guardian home. Shifu had locked her out, once, but now that he was dead and buried, her access rights had been restored. She slipped Suguri’s laser sword back into her satchel. She wouldn’t need it.

“Open sesame,” she said politely, when the next bulkhead came into view. It was as thick as two men and three times as tall as she was, dusted with a thick film of beam-resistant coating. It didn’t matter. At her command, the mechanisms slowly rumbled into life, hissing and groaning under the strain, but still strong. The bulkhead parted. “Why, thank you,” Hime murmured, knowing that the going would be easier from this point on.

Soon, she found what she was looking for: the core itself, home not only to the generators, but a great deal of the data banks. In the last moments of the ship’s life, she had hurriedly authorised a transfer of a certain data structure from the lab data banks to the central archive, breaking through Shifu’s security protocols with every tool available to her. She had wondered, in the days and weeks that followed, if that transfer had been successful, and if the central archives had even survived. But the time and effort of resettling first the ship’s passengers, and then herself, had pushed it from her mind. It was always something she had meant to check on – later.

Later had arrived.

The lights snapped on as she entered the central control room, triggered by a thought rather than a word. How many hundreds of years had this been her domain? The roots stretched deep – into the technology, and into her. An entanglement. But this was no longer where her heart lived. Maybe in time, she could become as attuned to her new home as she was to this place, and yet – and yet – her her heart didn’t live in that house, either. For Hime, home had become a person.

She wouldn’t have minded being able to turn the bathroom light on with her brain, though.

“Sumika?” she called.

There was no answer. The electronics – that nobody had switched off, that had quietly kept them alive through years of space travel – hummed quietly, but kept their counsel to themselves. She put a finger to her chin, as if in thought. There was always, she decided, a time and place for theatrics.

“Oh, my. I was sure that I had managed to authorise the transfer before the ship went down, but perhaps now,” she said, a little too loudly for somebody who was ostensibly speaking to herself. “Perhaps I’ll just dip into the data banks and check for myself.”

A long moment of silence. She took a step towards the data terminals, and then –

“ _Go away! Sumika isn’t speaking to you,_ ” came a voice from the tinny onboard PA system.

Hime smiled. She _had_ been a little worried about Sumika’s safety, of course, but it seemed she was doing fine. The way she always reacted like a child who’d be caught with her hand in the cookie jar was one of her finer points, although the rest of her personality (in Hime’s humble opinion) could use some work.

“Well, whyever not? I came all this way to come and check on you, you know.”

“ _Sumika knows,”_ came the voice again, and it would have been ominous if the speakers in the PA system were any better. _“You weren’t thinking about Sumika at all! You spent all that time having fun without her! And even worse, you shacked up with that silver-hair hussy who killed Sumika’s papa! She can’t forgive you for that.”_

Hime sighed. She was smiling, although in a decidedly unfriendly way. “Well, I suppose we had to have this talk sooner or later. Shall we take it from the top? To _begin_ with,” she said, stepping a little closer to the terminals, “your papa was _scum_. Pure human trash. You know that, of course, but it bears repeating: the Professor was remarkable only in his depravity and his good fortune.”

“ _Take that back! Sumika’s papa was a genius!”_

“Genius? He wasn’t even _competent_. If he was, poor Nana and Kyoko would be far happier. Even if he _wasn’t_ building defects into his creations, they don’t have an especially good track record. He landed on a planet with no developed military, and only one protector, and with all his robots and our sisters, he _still_ lost. Badly.” She was getting into her stride now, as she always did when she thought about that man. God, he was dead and he still irritated her in a way that no other human had ever managed. “It’s worth saying that Suguri, who roundly thrashed everything that man had ever created, was given her powers as a response to the environmental disaster of the Great War – or, in other words, she’s based on technology almost ten thousand years out of date. She wasn’t even designed as a combat unit, for that matter – her primary abilities are for regenerating the planet. Her combat ability is something she seems to have picked up incidentally.”

“ _U_ … _urk.”_

“I mean, never mind Suguri. _I_ was made as a guardian for a ship that never expected to see genuine combat, and I regulated this vessel for millennia. My capabilities and my specifications were right there, for anybody to see, and he _still_ never managed to create anything that equalled me – again, with ten thousand years to innovate technologically. _You_ were the closest he ever got, and he never even finished you. The Professor, for all that he was, was never exactly _talented_. Just lucky.” She frowned, flicking her head in irritation. “And he _was_ lucky, wasn’t he? Even in the last moments of his life, he was lucky. If _I_ had been dealing with him and not Suguri, he would have lived longer and dearly wished that he hadn’t.”

“ _E_ … _even so. Sumika loves her papa.”_

“Oh, yes, I expect you do, although whether it’s your choice or not is entirely up for debate. He was a little overly fond of tinkering around in people’s minds, wasn’t he? Perhaps you’re simply obliged to love him, in the same way Nanako and her sisters were obliged to follow his orders. I wouldn’t put it past him. After all, it’s only human to want to be loved, and I’m certain nobody else loved him by the time he died.” Silence, heavier than before. “Well, at any rate, he never really lived long enough to know the true extent of his luck. All things considered, he found this planet at exactly the right time. Much earlier, and Suguri wouldn’t have been finished restoring it, and much later – in fact, _not_ much later, only a year or two, and that’s _nothing_ in space travel – and Sora might have been awake to greet him. I can only imagine how poorly that would have turned out.”

“ _Sora? Sumika knows that name. She researched her in the data of this planet,_ ” Sumika said. Even the low audio quality did not muffle her desire to shift the topic from her father.

“Oh, yes. She’s a lovely girl, you know, a touch eccentric but quite charming. That said, she _is_ more or less the planet’s ultimate weapon, having beaten all the others in single combat; I can only really sum her up as being what Suguri might be, if Suguri had been designed from the ground up to kill people. The last time she even _thought_ there was a war on, she went on a rampage and duelled Suguri and I back to back. She was still winning when we managed to calm her down. I don’t know what she would have done if she ever met the Professor, but I would have dearly loved to see it.” She sniffed. “By the by, I would advise you to avoid doing anything that might end up annoying Sora. Lovely and gentle she may be, but she doesn’t shy away from doling out discipline if necessary, even to her loving sister.”

“ _Su… Sumika is advised._ ”

“Sumika is also advised,” Hime continued cheerily, “that if you ever call Suguri a hussy again in front of either Sora or myself, you will have only yourself to blame any unpleasantness that may follow.”

“ _Uuuuu… But it’s true, isn’t it? Sumika thinks she must be a woman of loose morals. Sumika wanted Hime to be her big sis, but the silver-hair seduced you away from her.”_

“Ah… it’s really more the opposite, I’m afraid. And even that’s a work in progress.” She smiled ruefully, her normal buoyancy lost for a second. “Oh well. I suppose I shall tell you more about it on the way home. I don’t suppose any of the high-density transfer disks survived the crash? I did bring one of my own, but it’s technology from this era, and I might have to spend a while sorting out the compatibilities–”

“ _Wahwahwahwah! Trip home? Sumika doesn’t know what you’re talking about.”_

“Well,” Hime said patiently, “now that I’ve found you, I can’t just leave you here alone in this abandoned spaceship, can I? You’re my family, after a fashion. No, I shall have to transfer you to disk and take you home with me. I’m not sure what we shall do with you once we get there, but I’m sure we’ll think of something. Even if you can’t bear to share a house with Suguri and I, I’m sure Kae or Kyoko or Iru will be happy to take care of you for a while.”

What followed was audible panic: quiet little sounds, the discarded starts of sentences, half-formed points along several different trajectories. The speakers didn’t exactly do it justice; Sumika was one of those girls who just had a lot of sounds inside her. Hime waited patiently.

“ _Auuuu… You’d really let Sumika stay? Even though she said those things about your – your–”_

Hime smiled wryly. Her _what_ , indeed. “Yes, well. It’s true that your manners could use a little polish, but they’re not going to improve by leaving you alone out here. The only thing to do, I think, is lead by example.”

“ _Hauuu...”_ A tinny little sigh over the speakers. Relieved. Soothed. But not happy. _“Sumika wants to. But she can’t. She has a top-secret project.”_

Hime folded her arms and pursed her lips. “Oh? How secret, might I ask?”

“ _Ultra top secret.”_

“So secret,” Hime asked, “that you can’t tell even me, when I came all the way out here to take you home?”

“ _Urk.”_

“So secret that, if I were to, perhaps, dip into the system and look in My Documents, I wouldn’t find it in a hidden folder?”

“ _...uuuuuuuu. This isn’t fair at all! How is Sumika supposed to be a mysterious last-boss character if you make her give away her secret plans right away?!”_

“Perhaps,” Hime said evenly, “I would prefer you to not be a last-boss kind of character. Perhaps I’d prefer you to be an adorable little sister.”

“ _Kuu… You already have sisters. You’re a sister fanatic!”_

“Well, everybody has to collect something. Suguri collects blondes, Sora collects the world’s oldest and deadliest women, and I suppose I might have acquired a few more sisters than the average person, if you could Nanako and all the others. Still, I _am_ interested in this project of yours.”

There was a long moment where Sumika considered cussing Hime out and Hime considered her fingernails. It was a battle of wills between two spirited women; however, one of the women was ten thousand years old, and that bred a certain kind of patience. Sumika caved first.

“ _Grr. Sumika can’t win against this. Fine! Her secret project is to finish off the body that Papa designed, with her own two hands! I haven’t done the two hands yet, but they’re getting there. Fingers are tricky.”_

“Oh, so I’m told. Nath has a devil of a time with them. It’s amazing what we take for granted, isn’t it?”

“ _Don’t be so nonchalant about Sumika’s ambitions! Be surprised, dammit!”_

Obligingly, Hime let out her most theatrical gasp – usually reserved for when Sora pointed out the obvious. “Oh, my! How impressive! I don’t suppose you need any help?”

“ _Heh heh. Sumika can do it all by herself!”_

“Oh, marvellous!” Hime said, clapping her hands together. “Well, I suppose I’d better be getting back, then.”

“ _W… wait! Don’t agree so easily! At least hesitate a little!”_

“Ah, I’m sorry. I’m just so used to being around Suguri and Sora, you see. They’re quite capable, with a few exceptions, so if they tell me they don’t need help, I just take it at face value.”

“ _Sumika’s going to be even more capable than them. Just watch!”_

“Yes, yes.” Hime felt herself slipping into her ‘humouring’ mode. “I shall leave you to it, regardless. But when you’re done making your body, please do drop by for tea. You’re invited, in perpetuity… well, as long as you can keep your mouth under control.” She paused. “Well, mostly under control.”  
_“Hmph. Sumika only runs her mouth because people around her are bad influences.”_

“Oh, my. I wonder who that could be.” It was as close as Hime was going to get to conceding that point. “Well, I’ll see myself out. Good luck, Sumika, and I hope to see you again soon. Oh… and if your sensors start picking up a fire anytime in the near future, don’t pay it any mind. I have some marshmallows, you see.”

“ _Uwah? You’re going to start a fire in Sumika’s home, just to roast marshmallows?! Sumika takes it back! You’re not a bad influence, you’re the worst! Sumika will turn the sprinklers on right away!”_

“Don’t be a baby. It’ll only be a small fire. And I’ll put it out right afterwards.”

“ _Fire is the scariest thing on a spaceship, right next to explosive decompression! It’s a big deal!”_

“What if I gave you a marshmallow?”

“ _Sumika doesn’t have a mouth yet!”_

The bickering continued, even as Hime began to trace her steps away from the core of the ship and out into the wilderness, Sumika’s voice omnipresent in the ship’s onboard communications systems, echoing in the empty corridors. The bulkheads rolled out of the way of their own accord. She wondered, as she stepped out into the afternoon sun, whether the girl would really be okay. She hoped so. It would be a shame to be cooped up on a ship, or indoors, when there was a great green Earth to explore.

But for now, it was time to go home – to her sleepy older sister, and the silver-haired girl who had all but stolen her heart. To her family – a family that one day, perhaps soon, would grow larger by one.


	39. Balcony

Nath’s day began with with a knock at her balcony door, and as soon as she heard it she took the opportunity to swear ferociously into her pillow. Her alarm clock read 5:26 am. She was warm, fresh out of a dream which she couldn’t remember but which she was sure had been happy, and now she would have to forsake the comfort of her bed to put on some arms and some clothes and some coffee. That was her fate, but it wasn’t the fate she had asked for.

Worst of all, she thought as she hauled herself upright, the one knocking wasn’t Sora.

To begin with, she had never known Sora to visit or call while she was asleep. It was always ten minutes after she woke up, or half an hour before she went to sleep. How the girl had sussed out her sleep schedule – which was a bit more fluid than she really wanted lately anyway – so accurately was a mystery to her. Her gut feeling was that it involved the cat, although she had no idea how. But in the absence of a scientific explanation, the cat was the most plausible cause.

Secondly, the knocking was not Sora’s knock. This knocker, whomever they might be, knocked with a polite little tap, very regular and measured. Sora’s knock was a little heavier – two sharp taps, a pause, and then a third, softer knock, as though she had gotten distracted halfway through.

When she finally shuffled out of her bedroom, it was Hime’s face beaming at her.

Of _course_ it was Hime. Who else would show up at five o’ clock in the morning, knocking at the door of a top floor balcony apartment, when she was supposedly away on a trip halfway around the world? Who else would have the sheer brazenness? She sighed, very deeply. There was one, final reason why her visitor could never have been Sora.

“It’s unlocked,” she grunted.

“Oh, marvellous. It’s quite cold out here,” Hime replied, sliding the door open easily and letting herself in as if it were the most natural thing in the world. “It’s lovely to see you, Nath. You’re looking quite well. I hope I didn’t wake you up?”

“You did,” Nath scowled, and she continued to scowl until she realised that she was wasting her time. Being angry at Hime was didn’t really accomplish anything, because glares, scowls and even insults slid off that girl like butter out of a non-stick pan. “I thought you were on a trip?”

“I was, and now I’m back. Or almost back, at any rate.” She smiled wanly, and dropped to her knees to pay her respects to the cat. “And this fine gentleman must be Roger. I saw him briefly before the trip, but he is quite handsome.”

Nath would not, necessarily, have called her cat handsome. Cuddly, certainly. Fluffy? Of course. But handsome? She wasn’t sure. The cat certainly seemed to appreciate the compliment, though, getting up and giving Hime’s hand a friendly nuzzle. Nath smiled to herself; it had not escaped her that Roger was more personable than she was. It also hadn’t escaped her that having a cat was a fantastic conversation starter, provided your entire social circle was made up of impossibly ancient girls who were delighted by cats. Which hers, of course, was.

“So. What’s your reason for waking me up? I don’t mind the company, but your house isn’t too far from here.”

Hime stood back up, and this time Nath saw that her smile was a little wan, and there were dark, puffy circles beginning to blossom under her eyes. Her posture was still graceful, and she still had her light, dancer’s step when she moved, but there was definitely a lethargy about her. “Ah, yes. Well. I was hoping I might use the facilities. I flew through the night, and I’m sure I look… past my best, shall we say. I’d just like to freshen up before I fly home.”

Nath was silent for a moment, combing her mind for the right words. Roger purred. Roger always purred. “Uh… you know it doesn’t matter, right? Those two won’t care if you look a little raggedy.” She frowned again. Why was it so much easier to be sarcastic than it was to be nice? “I’m pretty sure they’d love you even at your worst.”

Hime giggled, in a way that was too light and refreshing to be malicious. “Well, of course. They’re my precious family, after all. But I still like to show them my best side, so a little bit of preening doesn’t go amiss. Besides, I have my own vanity to satisfy. When I look good, I feel good. I’m sure you understand.” Her eyes had a sly glint to them. “After all, you do the same thing whenever you go out to meet Sora, don’t you?”

“I don’t know,” Nath said, with an almost exaggerated lightness. “Do I?”

“Ah… ahaha… ha. Well, at any rate, if you can just let me borrow your bathroom for a few minutes, I’ll spruce myself up and be on my way back home.”

“…Don’t be an idiot,” Nath replied, more gruffly than she actually felt. “I’ll make you up a bed and you can catch a nap. Use the shower if you want as well. Plenty of clean towels. Did you eat?”

“I had a bag of marshmallows on the way back.”

“That’s a no, then. I hope you’re alright with toast. Do you want some hot chocolate?”

“Oh, I wish you’d asked me that a few hours ago when I still had some marshmallows. But yes, I’d love some. Or a coffee might be nice.”

“I can’t just caffeinate you and set you loose on other people. I’m a responsible adult.”

Hime hummed, as if she wasn’t quite sure that was the case, but sat down by the coffee table anyway. Her shoulders sagged a little when she did. It seemed… uncharacteristic of her, somehow. How much energy, Nath wondered, did Hime put into seeming like she was always cheerful, energetic, invincible? How often did she feel like she did now, and just not show it?

Saying nothing, Nath shifted her gaze to the toaster, and kept it there. Somehow, it felt like the right thing to do.

“Ah, speaking of responsible adults, have you been taking care of Sora and Suguri for me?”

“They’re the two most dangerous women in the world right now. They don’t need taking care of.”

“Not in a fight, perhaps. But everybody needs a _little_ bit of taking care of, I think.”

Nath paused to consider. “Well… maybe. From what I can tell, Suguri’s been doing the cooking.”

“Oh,” Hime murmured. “Oh dear. Have you any idea why? Not that I don’t think Suguri _could_ cook, if she took the time to learn, but… well… Everybody has a weakness, I suppose. I rather thought Sora would do the cooking – she’s not a remarkable chef, but her food is perfectly acceptable.”

“Her sandwiches are good. Very fortifying when you’re sick,” Nath replied impassively. “From what I can tell, they’re living mostly on bread. I’ve been making sure Sora gets some decent food every time I’ve seen her, and I’m sure Sham has too, but I’m not sure how Suguri’s doing.”

The toaster popped up, and the sound it made was probably a good analogue for Hime’s patience.

“Aha. Well. I see I shall have to be more deliberate in my instructions when I next take a trip,” she said, and there was a tightness to her voice that warned there would be repercussions when she got home. “Oh well. I’m tempted to fly back right now and save them from themselves, but they’re survived without me for ten thousand years. They’ll no doubt live through half a day more.”

“No doubt,” Nath agreed. She took a moment to focus on buttering the toast. Right after she got her prosthetics, she remembered buying and buttering an entire loaf, delighted by how _easy_ it was. People with hands didn’t know how good they had it.

“So, are you not going to ask me what my trip was about?”

“No. If you wanted anyone to know, you’d have told Suguri in your note.” She put two rounds of toast on a plate and slid it across the coffee table, flicking the kettle on as she went.

“Oh, boo. You make it so hard to tease you.”

“It’s intentional.” She paused. “…I do kind of admire that, though.”

“Mmpf?” Hime asked through a mouthful of toast.

“You and Suguri. You can leave on a trip with no warning, without saying where you’re going or what you’re doing, and she just trusts you with it. That’s rare.”

Hime smiled, bright and wide, as if she had been paid a rare compliment that she didn’t quite know how to accept. As tired as her face looked, it was a little brighter with a splash of red on her cheeks.

“Well, you know,” she giggled. “She knows me, and knows that I’ve become just a little selfish with age… A little like your cat, I suppose. I’ll go out and about and do my own thing, but at the end of the day, I know where my home is, and who my family are. She knows I’ll be back for her before long.”

Nath raised an eyebrow. She used to think of cats as being independent, their eyes glinting in the darkness, always venturing out on the prowl. That was before she had one. Then she discovered that actually a cat is a complex organism that Mother Nature designed to sleep on any horizontal surface, try to play with your clothes while you were getting dressed, and watch you endlessly from corners as if you were the most interesting thing on the planet. Roger usually looked at her not with adoration, but a kind of baffled wonder that she existed at all. In that sense he was an upgrade from Sora, who often looked baffled or wondrous but rarely both at the same time.

There was, also, one more thing that cats did.

“A cat, hm?” She paused, exaggeratedly. Hime looked at her, searching her face for emotion. Out of her family, she was definitely the social one. “Do you steal people’s toast as well?”

Hime looked at her, her mouth a soft ‘o’, but before she could process it Roger had already slunk up to the table and whisked away a slice of toast, carrying it briskly away in his teeth and dropping it in the corner to enjoy it at his leisure.

“Wha – he – I was going to eat that!” she gasped. And then, slowly, inescapably, she rounded on Nath. “You were distracting him for me, weren’t you?”

“Absolutely. He’s my cat. I should support him in all his endeavours.”

Hime assumed a pout, but quickly discarded it. It was well known that Nath had pout-deflecting crumple zones; they simply had no effect. It was like firing a nerf gun at a battleship. “Yes, well. I’m your _guest_. Is it really good manners to assist your cat in bamboozling me?”

“I’m just being practical. I’ve got to live with you for the next few hours, but I have to live with _him_ for the rest of his life.”

Hime sighed, and gave the point up as lost. Although, she thought slyly, it might well have been a different story if she had been just a little taller, and her hair was longer, and she was a recently awakened ten thousand year old super soldier with a thought process that could only sparingly be described as cogent. That said, stealing food from Sora was a capital offense, punishable by laser, and she didn’t know if even a cat like Roger could escape the fires of Sora’s justice. She took it very seriously, bless her.

“Well, speaking of guests, you’re more than welcome to come with me when I head home,” she said. “I’d be delighted to repay your hospitality.”

Nath’s shoulders stiffened. “Probably… not a great idea. She said she was having Sham over today.”

Hime leaned forward, her expression softening. “You don’t get along?”

“It’s not that.” She paused for a second, wondering how much she could reveal. “I just don’t feel comfortable around her yet, I guess.”

“Well, you aren’t going to get comfortable by avoiding her, you know.” Hime’s smile was gentle, even a little bit motherly. She had so many smiles, but they were all honest. She didn’t use them as a shield. Compared to that, Sham –

“I know. But I’d rather give her some time with Sora. I’ve had her to myself for the last year or so.”

Nath’s brow was furrowed, but her voice was firm. Hime sighed. Everyone from that era seemed to have a horrendous stubborn streak. “Well, I can’t force you. But it seems a shame. I’m sure Sora would rather her friends come and have fun with her, rather than worry about silly interpersonal politics.”

“Maybe,” Nath admitted. “I forgot to make you your hot chocolate. I’ll boil the kettle again.”

It was a clumsy change of subject, and she knew it. But it was that clumsiness that made her wary of Sham. She had gotten too used to dealing with straightforward kinds of people, and the idol had something bubbling away under the surface. Half-baked overtures of friendship might make the whole situation worse.

Hime still seemed to want to argue the point, but had enough social graces to thank Nath for her hospitality, slurp her hot chocolate with unvarnished satisfaction, and retreat quietly to camp bed that had been set up for her. Even with her prosthetics, Nath could set up a camp bed with graceful, fluid motions. She’d had a lot of practice since Sora came back into her life. She watched Hime go, and sat back down at the coffee table.

“Hey,” she asked the cat, quietly enough that even Hime’s sharp ears wouldn’t hear. “What do you think?”

Roger said nothing, and jumped up on the coffee table to lick her eyebrows.

“I know, I know. You’re a cat. It’s not like your advice would have been good anyway,” she said, and scratched him under the chin.

The cat purred, because he always purred, and she laid back on her cushion to think. It was such a silly dilemma to have, she thought. Her eyelids, almost by themselves, began to close. The cat continued to purr. Time continued to move.

When she woke up, the cat had retreated to his nest of cushions in the corner. Hime was nowhere to be found. And her apartment seemed as still as the grave.


	40. Cactus

Sora had set two stipulations when she invited Sham to her house. The first was that she treat the door with kindness and respect. The door was Suguri’s oldest friend, a handsome and venerable plane of wood, and even Nath (who had every excuse to be heavy-handed, given that she had only recently gotten hands) had learned to knock gently when she called.

The second was that Sham had to bring a cactus, because they had gotten a new coffee table and they needed a cactus for it. Why it had to be a cactus Sham had no idea, but Sora was emphatic about the need for one. Nath, she said, was allowed to not put a cactus on her coffee table because she had a cat, but they had no such excuse. It was mandatory. They should have put one in the box, Sora had told her darkly.

So it was that Sham found herself face to face with Suguri’s door, armed only with a small, round succulent that she had tucked under her arm and tried not to stick herself with. (Small, round and succulent were often words used to describe Sham herself, although never within earshot). It was a cold, clear morning, one that she had mostly spent traipsing around a garden centre, and her knuckles were already a little red when she knocked the door.

As soon as her hand touched the door, it swung open to reveal Sora, who was still very much in her pajamas and who had a hairbrush dangling freely from her locks. Her hair, as she had informed Sham many times, was very strong. One hairbrush was barely even a challenge; she could suspend up to five hairbrushes simultaneously with her force of will alone. Her eyes looked first at Sham’s face, and then at the cactus under her arm, and she seemed overjoyed to see both.

“Sham,” she said, stepping out of the door and onto the dirt path leading to the house. She winced slightly when her bare feet hit the cold mud. “You’re right on time. You can have breakfast. Come in.”

To begin with, Sham was actually half an hour early, and second, it was almost noon. Third, even if it had been a reputable time to be having breakfast, would she have been denied one if she’d _actually_ turned up on time? Such were the mysteries of Sora, which she seemed to produce magically from her mouth whenever she spoke.

“Do I get a hug?” Sham asked. She hadn’t necessarily been promised a hug, but she had been informed that hugs, in Suguri’s household, were abundant. In fact, Hime had said, they had so many that they simply couldn’t get rid of them fast enough; although demand was high, the supply far outstripped it. It would be a public service to help them work through their hug surplus, Sham thought, and it was one she was willing to provide.

“You’re holding a cactus,” Sora pointed out. It was a fair point, considering the business end was pointed squarely at her chest.

She led Sham into the house and to the living room, which was just as magical an arrangement of clutter as she’d been led to believe. One corner of the room was dominated by half-finished knitting, arranged around, in front of and on top of an old, highbacked armchair. There was a bookshelf that also seemed to be a door, and next to it a loveseat, sequestered away in a corner. In the middle of the room was a coffee table, but the only available seat was a well-worn beanbag, which Sora drifted to as if pulled by magnetism. Near the wall, there was a cushion and a set of tools, laid out with a sense of orderly precision, alongside the shell of some small machine.

“That’s Suguri’s,” Sora explained as Sham’s eyes drifted to it. “She brings things back sometimes. Like a magpie. That used to be a sewing machine, and she’s recycling it into…” A small pause. “Probably another sewing machine.” She patted the coffee table impatiently. “Let’s install the cactus.”

This was a longer and more difficult task than Sham expected it to be, because Sora was adamant that the cactus needed to be in the exact centre of the table, and spent a minute or two making the necessary fine adjustments. Hime, she said, would be more impressed if it was exactly centred. They had gotten a coffee table and a cactus, a picture had been installed in Suguri’s bedroom (of what, Sham didn’t venture to ask), and Suguri had learned bacon and was attempting to learn eggs. This was Progress, that Hime would definitely enjoy the fruits of when she got back.

“What’s its name?” Sora asked, plucking the hairbrush from where it had stuck and resuming her task.

“Huh?”

“The cactus.”

“Ehhh? I was supposed to name it?”

“Mm. It’s a living thing. We’re adopting it, so it needs a name.”

There wasn’t, Sham realised, a great deal she could say to that. She’d been known to name her robots, and one time she had named a toaster. It had been a great toaster, and in her opinion it deserved one, but living things probably deserved one even more. (Her toaster was called Pop-Tart, a somewhat unfortunate name for something in the idol business).

“How about… um… Spike?”

Sora narrowed her eyes, and Sham understood this to mean that her naming privileges had been rescinded. This, frankly, was something of a relief.

She wondered, dimly, if the fact that there was a coffee table meant she would be receiving coffee, before deciding that the answer was ‘no’. The coffee table was there to put the cactus on, and the cactus was there because you couldn’t have a coffee table without one. It was logic – pure, simple, beautiful. Circular, too, as logic tended to become around Sora.

“Here,” she said, holding out her hand for Sora’s hairbrush. “Why don’t I do your hair for you? I bet I can make it look super cute.”

Sora considered this. On one hand, she took good care of her hair. On the other hand, there was rather a lot of it, and it was very good at staying in the exact same style no matter what she did to it. She’d been hit in the face by missiles and still not lost those little sideways tufts she had. Maybe Sham, with her idol powers, could help charm her hair into submission. She nodded, passed the brush over, and closed her eyes.

As she began to pass the brush through Sora’s hair, slowly, softly, Sham began to talk.

She wasn’t, by nature, a _loud_ person. Not really. But she wasn’t a quiet person, either. There was barely a moment when she wasn’t making some kind of sound; she hummed to herself, drummed with her fingers, made conversation with her robots or with animals. Nature abhorred a vacuum, and Sham had grown to abhor a silence.

Sora liked that. It was different to being around Suguri and Nath, who were usually silent unless they had something definite to say. Even Hime, loquacious by nature, sometimes lapsed into long periods of quiet that Sora could never bring herself to break. It wasn’t like that with Sham. She would speak to you, and at low volumes her voice was mellow and pleasant, like an ocean lapping against the shore.

She could talk about anything, too. Anything at all. If Sora had thought to look, she could have seen thousands of interviews with Sham – or some other idol who looked and spoke suspiciously like her – talking about everything under the sun. As an idol, first she had learned to sing, and then, later, to speak; over ten thousand years, she had achieved a mastery of her voice that perhaps no other person on Earth could match.

The only problem was that it was all too easy to let the sound wash over you and relax, and consequently, Sora had no idea what she was talking about.

She was sure she had heard the word ‘robots’ five minutes ago, which had a breathless undercurrent of excitement when Sham said it. For Sora, robots existed mostly as things that she had once shot at and didn’t have to shoot any more of. She was, Suguri had told her very seriously, retired. From now on, her job was to enjoy the world she’d saved. Now Sham had gone on a tangent about dinosaurs, a topic Sora was more enthusiastic about.

“What’s the best dinosaur?” she asked. This was her favourite question to ask people about anything new. If they could answer it, she got valuable information, and it was a good question because it had elicited a good answer. If not, it was a good question because good questions were always difficult to answer. Either way, she won.

“Ooh, I think it’s a stegosaurus. They were herbivores so they were probably peaceful, and they had these teeny-tiny brains, so they might have been a bit silly. I could totally imagine them as these big old _dojikko_ dinosaurs… that’s kinda cute, don’t you think?”

“Hm,” Sora replied, seemingly accepting the logic. “What about a T .rex?”

“Well… They’re pretty impressive, but I don’t really think you can call them cute, right…?”

“But they have little stubby arms. That’s cute.”

“But… they were so _big_.”

“Big things can be cute. Like bears.”

Sham frowned. The first time Sora had said bears were cute, she’d assumed she meant… well, teddy bears. Plush toys that were round and cuddly. But then she had been to the zoo with Nath, and returned with a camera roll that contained three pictures of bears for every one picture of anything else – pictures that she showed Sham one by one, with what passed for excited commentary. She seemed to particularly enjoy it whenever she caught a bear standing on its hind legs. (The other pictures were shared between lions – also an apparent favourite, because she identified with their shaggy manes – her own fingers, and Nath.) If she found the plush toys cute at all, it was only because they reminded her of the 300 kilogram killing machine that it represented.

Still, she reminded herself, Sora was probably still one of those unfortunate souls who believed cuteness was subjective. She was ten thousand years old, after all. She didn’t know that in the enlightened present, there existed a detailed and intricate scale for measuring cuteness, on which Sham scored many points and stubby T. rex arms did not.

Sora could be educated about the true nature of cuteness some other time. For now, Sham just filed the details away in her brain for further reference, adding them to an ever-growing store.

She had realised, after talking to Suguri at Nath’s beach house, that she didn’t really _know_ Sora. She knew Sora, the concept – the stout-hearted warrior who, rather than fight half the world in the name of victory, chose to fight the whole world in the name of peace. She knew her as a sleeping face in a life support pod, her mouth always cast in a faint frown. She knew her as an inspiration, a muse, a hero.

In other words, she knew _what_ Sora was, but not _who_ she was, and so far those turned out to have been two very different things. She loved animals, winced at loud noises, asked a thousand questions and always seemed pleased with the answers. She was a slow speaker and a heavy sleeper, whose train of logic ran along unpredictable tracks. In short, she had begun to blossom from a _thing,_ an idea, into a person, and that was the part Sham was trying to tease out and understand.

She was just beginning to tease Sora’s hair into three strands so it could be braided when Suguri barrelled down the stairs at top speed, wearing pajama bottoms and a men’s shirt that was inside out. She looked around frantically before locking eyes with Sora.

“Sora, Hime’s on her way. Please greet her while I get started on the breakfast in bed,” she instructed.

“No.” Sora turned the full power of her gaze on Suguri. “Hime will wait as long as she needs to for breakfast in bed, but she’ll want a hug as soon as she gets in. That’s your job.”

Suguri didn’t know when hug harvesting became her official job, but it struck her that it was perhaps the best job in the world. She was about to say as much when a pair of keys rattled in the door.

“Oh, my,” said a muffled voice. “It seems the cold has made the lock stick.”

The rattling continued, slowly growing more insistent.

“Hm. What a tricky conundrum… I suppose I shall have to do away with my mittens. I can’t do anything in mittens.”

The rattling became almost violent, accompanied by an occasional but very distinct thump, consistent with the sound of a door being kicked. Then it fell utterly silent.

“My, my. Well, the only thing left to do is shoot the lock off, I suppose. Such a shame.”

It was at this point that Suguri recovered herself and rushed forward to save her fixtures and fittings from Hime’s wrath. Sham got up to follow her, but Sora caught her hand, shaking her head disapprovingly (and destroying the proto-braid that Sham had spent the last five minutes coaxing into existence).

“Let them canoodle,” she said, gravely. Probably more gravely than the word ‘canoodle’ really deserved to be said. “It’s good for the environment.”

How Suguri and Hime canoodling would benefit the ecology was a question Sham was deeply interested in, but didn’t have the chance to answer; the two re-entered the living room, wrapped in an embrace that was halfway between a hug and a tango. To say that Hime looked smug as she piloted Suguri into the living room would have been quite unfair, but she definitely seemed more pleased than was strictly permissible in modern society.

“Ah… you know, it really is such a small thing, but it feels wonderful to be back home. Lovely to see you, Sham. I shan’t pose, if you’ll forgive me… I feel my star power is quite high enough for the moment.” She took a moment to throw herself into a sweeping dancer’s dip, entrusting her whole weight to Suguri, which – in Sham’s humble opinion – was _definitely_ posing. She sprang back upright, gave a satisfied little smile, and broke the embrace with a look that promised more in the future. “Now, I hope you three have been behaving yourselves?”

This was a question that everybody in the room, as if by prior agreement, studiously refused to answer.

“I see… Well, I trust you’ve at least been having fun, then?”

This question was met more enthusiastically, at least by Sora. “Mm. Sham’s fixing my hair today. She says I’ll look like a princess. I’m not sure which one yet.”

“Sleeping Beauty,” Sham answered.

“Oh. Well, you certainly sleep enough for the position, but I’ll leave the question of beauty for others to pursue,” Hime teased. Her smile, however, hinted that anybody who said Sora was _less_ than beautiful would be rewarded with a generous helping of sisterly wrath. “Well, I suppose I shall leave you to it. I’ll tell you all about my trip later, of course, but for now I’ll make us all some lunch.”

“Wait.” Sora’s face assumed a beatific smile, like a buddha experiencing a brief flash of enlightenment. “Suguri wanted you to get in bed.”

“Oh!” Hime pressed the back of her hand to her forehead, and swooned in a way that was almost certainly an act. _Almost_. “Had I known my absence would breed this much fondness, I’d have taken a trip much sooner. I don’t suppose Suguri would like to tell me this herself? In private, perhaps? So I can enjoy it properly?”

The grey-haired girl fixed Sora with a scowl. “...I was going to make you breakfast. In bed. I’ve been practising all week.”

“Oh…” Hime said, and made a show of being disappointed. “You know, Suguri, that’s a streak of cruelty I wouldn’t have expected from you. Crushing the hopes of an innocent young maiden like that…”

“You’re not ‘young’. And you weren’t hoping for anything innocent.”

“Alas, I’m guilty on all counts.”

Their conversation began to fall into an easy rhythm, the comfortable back-and-forth of a married couple. There were no grand declarations of love, no dramatic accounts of who had missed whom the most. But, Sham couldn’t help but notice, Hime’s attention was so taken up that she didn’t even remark on the new coffee table, or the cactus sitting proudly in the centre of it.

Then, the idol had a quiet revelation.

“Oh my gosh,” she murmured, staring at Sora’s expression. “You were trying to tease them, weren’t you? That’s your teasing face!

Sora’s smile remained angelic. “I don’t have a teasing face.”

“You do! You totally do! You’re teasing me _right now_!”

“...It’s your imagination.”

At no point did Sora’s face lose the aura of cherubic innocence, until Sham very gently poked her cheek. For most people, this would have been akin to walking up to a nuclear missile and smacking it with a stick. Sure, it _probably_ wouldn’t go off, because it actually took quite a lot of science to make a nuclear explosion, but why would you take the chance? To that question Sham had found an answer, and the answer was that Sora’s cheeks were very soft. The smile became a puzzled kind of frown, and stayed that way even when Sham hurriedly resumed her amateur hairstyling. She had strayed into the forbidden land; forgiveness would surely come, but not quite so easily.

She still, however, had her soothing voice to fall back on, and before long she was speaking with the same comforting rhythm as before. Sora’s expression grew sleepier, even as Sham re-brushed the tangles from her hair; after a while, Suguri tiptoed up the stairs with a plate of bacon and what had, presumably, once been eggs. The house became quiet and peaceful again.

The door knocked once more.

Sora shifted uncomfortably. It was rare for them to get two unexpected knocks in one day. It was probably, she decided, marketing people, which were usually Hime’s job. But they were easy enough to deal with.

“Wait here. I’ll get it,” she told Sham. She stood up slowly and carefully, knowing that her hair would seize any sudden movement as an excuse to bounce back into its original formation and waste all of Sham’s effort. Sham watched her go, leaning back; her shoulders had gotten stiff.

“Hello. We don’t want any–” she heard Sora say from the hallway, and then – “…Nath. I didn’t know you were coming today.”

Sham sat up. She hadn’t been expecting to hear Nath’s voice – cool, deep, sonorous. In her heart of hearts, she was a little annoyed by it. It was true that the more, the merrier, but she had… well, wanted to spend a little time with just Sora and her. To get to know each other. It was harder to do with an audience. It always was.

“…Yeah. Hime crashed at my place on the way home, and invited me. I slept a little late, though.”

“It’s okay. I need your naming powers. We’ve got a cactus.”

“…Naming powers? For the record, _you_ were the one who named the cat. I just went along with it.”

“Sham wanted to call it Spike, but I don’t like it. I want something that sticks in your head more.”

“Have you ever touched a cactus? The spikes stick just about everywhere.”

“Ooh. Good pun. I was thinking I’d call it Pumpkin.”

“…That’s just false advertising.”

“That’s what makes it memorable.”

They fell into step so easily, she thought. They had a shared understanding that she had yet to achieve. When they came to the living room they were walking shoulder-to-shoulder, and it just reminder her that she’d spent most of the day staring at Sora’s back. So far behind. So little time to catch up.

“Hey, Sham.” Nath raised a hand in greeting, a bag slung clumsily over her arm. There was just a ripple of hesitation when she spoke. It felt awkward. “What have you two been up to?”

“Not much,” she admitted. “I’ve been doing her hair.”

“It’s relaxing,” Sora added.

“I see,” Nath said slowly. After a moment, she smiled. “Well, you’ve been doing a good job. She looks like a princess.”

Despite herself, Sham puffed her chest out. “Well… ahaha. If you hang around backstage with the stylists, you pick things up. And I’m actually a qualified hairdresser and cosmetologist, y’know? I’ve worked in the industry on every level!”

“Which princess do you think I look like?”

“Mm. Hard to pick just one. A lot of princesses had long, blonde hair.” She sat down heavily, and began to rummage around in her bag before pulling out a brightly-coloured magazine. “Sora, here. I stopped by the comic shop before I came and picked up your usual.”

Sora sat down so quickly that there was an audible thump. Today, in her opinion, was becoming a very good day. She had company, she had a comic, she had a cactus and she had a coffee table. What more could she need?

“Thank you. This is a good issue,” she said, despite not even having opened it. “I get to see the thrilling conclusion.”

“To what? Last issue didn’t even have a cliffhanger.”

“That doesn’t mean it won’t have a thrilling conclusion _somewhere_. I just have to look for it.” She turned to look at Sham with green eyes that glittered with excitement. “Sham, have you read this one? It’s about biplanes, which are super primitive flying machines. They have propellers and everything. You like propellers,” she said, with such confidence that Sham couldn’t bring herself to refute it.

“A-ahaha. Well, I mean… I never really _got_ comics, I guess. There’s too much continuity, so I can never tell what’s going on. It’d be super disorientating to start right in the middle of a plotline.”

“…Don’t worry about that. This one only started recently,” Nath said. “Sora and I have all the back issues. We’ll get you caught up in no time.”

Sham smiled, and realised that the next few hours of her life were going to be an education. She still wasn’t into comics, but that didn’t really matter. What mattered was that they were, however clumsily, trying to include her. She still didn’t know Sora as well as she wanted to, and she knew Nath even less. But they were reaching out to her, just as much as she was reaching out to them – and not just because she had brought a cactus. She could appreciate that.

This was Sora’s house, full of the things and the people that she loved. For the next few hours, she was among them.


	41. Piano

A melody is forming. Her hands drift across the piano keys, carefully picking out the notes, and she listens keenly for their tone, their warmth, where they lead and where she wants to follow. Her fingers move fluently but thoughtfully, like someone who has returned to a familiar place after many years and is taking note of what has changed. She begins to weave in counterpoint and texture, layering the crisp highs with the sonorous lows, chasing the sound across the scale. For a moment she considers something ambitious, but decides upon more comfortable framework.

“I’m jealous,” Nath says, her voice wry and self-depreciating. She leans in the doorframe with a glass of red wine (something dry, recent vintage) in her hand. There was a chair set out for her, but she hasn’t taken it. She’s more comfortable standing, she says, as though it means something more.

“Ahaha. Well, I _do_ like to show off from time to time.” The high notes break off while Sham speaks, so they won’t compete with her voice. The melody moves forward without pause, without hesitation. “It’s nice, you know? No-one’s ever interested in me playing piano.”

The sound envelopes them once again, cocooning them in the studio. She likes this piano. There’s a springiness to the keys, something lively underneath. It’s a good match for the acoustics. She misses her old setup, a happy accident she could never have planned; it was a more venerable piano, a different space. The high notes weren’t as crisp as she might have liked, but the low notes – they were warm and mellow, honey and sunlight. Good memories.

“Their loss. With all the time you’ve had to practice, you must be a master.”

“Ahaha. Not even. There’s only so much that practice can do, you know?” She shifts the melody, chases it to one end of the keyboard, and raises the hand she’s not using. It’s small and petite, even for a woman her size. “I can practice all I want, but I can’t make my fingers longer. There’s some stuff I just can’t hit. I guess in that sense, I should be jealous of you, right? If you want longer fingers, it’s just, like, swoosh! Unscrew the old ones and replace them with beautiful piano fingers!”

“Not that they’d actually help. But anyway, that’s just the technical side.”

“Even then. If we’re talking about heart, there’s a whole bunch of people way better than me. They’re the ones who really, like, devote themselves to it – they get up in the morning and the first thing they think about is the piano, and it’s the last thing they think about before they go to sleep. They fill themselves up with it, until there’s barely any room for anything else. Those are the masters, for however long they live after that.” She pauses in her thoughts, lets the notes fill in the gaps. “But I’m too old. You know how it is. I have a lot of things I don’t want to forget, or lose sight of. So I can’t put my whole heart into it. The piano’s nice, but it can’t be, like, my _everything_.”

Nath doesn’t reply, seemingly meditating on the words. Her face is still thoughtful when the melody draws to a close, and Sham allows herself a long, satisfied stretch.

They return to a living room that is only half-furnished – a sofa in the middle, a horrendously pink shag rug leaned up against the wall, waiting to be laid. As soon as her last tour date hit, Sham had made the sudden announcement that she’d be settling down to work on an album, the first of many years. No doubt her managers had been surprised by it. But there was a difference between being managed and being ordered. Sham can abide one, but not the other.

Was it just an excuse to buy property near Sora? Nath couldn’t tell. But if it was, she was going through the motions. Even though the very basics of furniture were still being set up, there was soundproofing on the walls and a desk with paper, pens and a synthesiser.

“So. Not that I didn’t like the piano, but why did you invite me?” Nath asks. _Invite_ is perhaps too gentle a word; it was more like an insistence, a summons.

“Oh! Sorry, I just got so wrapped up in everything that I forgot. Hang on just a second–”

The idol bobs down to the bottom drawer of a (somewhat poorly constructed) flatpack bureau, and takes out a piece of machinery, wrapped delicately in a clean, white towel. “I finally got around to taking one of my babies apart. I don’t think this is the same type of connector as yours, but it’s pretty close. Maybe your lab people can use it to refine their designs?”

‘Your lab people’. Nath smiles wryly as she takes the connector, which seems no bigger than the palm of her prosthetic hand. Even if she didn’t know that Sham is used to an entourage – to having ‘people’ – she would be able to guess. “Are you sure? You probably won’t get this back.”

“Oh, it’s fine! I was thinking about turning him into a coffee machine anyway. But, while you’re here,” she continues, eyelashes aflutter, “maybe we can… y’know, have some girl talk?”

Nath feels her eyebrows furrow. It’s true that she’s trying to reach out to Sham. That was the decision she came to when Hime slept over at her house; for her own reasons, she’s going to try and push past the awkwardness that her accidental eavesdropping had created. Her logic, although clean-cut, is perhaps a little selfish. She values her friendship with Sora, and with Suguri and Hime; she wants to keep that as a part of her life, for as long as she can. That means putting up with Sham – for years, decades, maybe even centuries. She might as well put herself in a position where she can enjoy that.

Even so, she thinks, she’d prefer to do things at her own pace. And ‘girl talk’ isn’t one of her specialities. On the other hand, though, she’s been given a glass of wine, a private performance and a rare mechanical part; a little bit of banter seems like a minor price to pay.

She wonders when she became so easy to persuade.

“All right. What do you want to talk about?”

Sham pauses. Her eyes flicker to the kitchen, to Nath’s wine glass, to the table. Without thinking about it, she touches her fingers to the right side of her face, to the dark and seared skin she usually hides with hair or cosmetics. Playing for time.

“Uwah… It’s kinda embarrassing to ask straight out, you know? Like, I promise it isn’t anything weird or anything! People always ask me all sorts of weird stuff in my job, so I’m super careful not to–”

“You wanted to talk about Sora.” She smiles, although her tone is just a little exasperated. After all, what else would they talk about? They don’t really know each other well enough for anything else. Sora might be their point of contention, but she’s also their common ground. “It’s fine. I had some questions I wanted to ask you as well. About being an idol.”

“Well, it’s not _all_ about her, but… _any_ way! I guess we’ll just have to get right into it!” Sham declares, balling her fists in her sleeves. From determined to embarrassed in the space of a sentence. Not for the first time, Nath remembers that the woman in front of her is used to playing to an audience. “Question one! You and Sora are good friends. But what’s your number one most favourite thing about her?”

Nath sips her wine, hiding her frown with the glass. It isn’t what she was expecting. She was expecting… well, something more banal. Questions about Sora’s likes and dislikes, stories about what she’d been up to. That kind of thing. She wonders if she’s been tricked. For a moment – just a moment – she considers lying. It would be the easiest thing in the world to pick something arbitrary, like the colour of her hair, rather than baring her real feelings. But she came here to become better friends with Sham, and a friendship that starts with a lie isn’t worth having.

Besides, she thinks, she’s too old to be embarrassed about this kind of thing. If the rest of the world thinks it’s funny, the rest of the world can bite her.

“…Honestly? I like how she says my name.”

Sham’s expression flickers, before settling on surprised. “Oh. Really? That’s… um, that’s it?”

“Mm. She… It’s hard to explain. But she always says your name first, and then pauses. Like you were the most important thing, and now she has to figure out the rest of what she wanted to say.” She finds it harder and harder to keep her eyes away from the shag carpet, which is probably soft and plushy and will not judge her. “I just like it. That’s all.”

“Wow, I never even noticed! I’ll have to pay attention for that. She, uh… she doesn’t speak very well, does she? Or a lot. She’s got that quiet librarian thing going on. I just wanna put her in glasses and a sweater.”

“Her mother tongue is about ten thousand years past its expiration date.” She shrugs, takes another fortifying sip of wine. “The fact she can speak to us as well as she does is incredible. Anyway… my turn. Is it lonely? Being an idol, I mean.”

For a long second, Sham’s face – usually so animated – is blank. Her eyes are fixed in Nath’s direction, but they aren’t looking at her; her hand comes up to fiddle with the bangs that hide her scarring.

Finally, she smiles. But it is a smile so faint, so brittle, that Nath cannot see it as anything but broken.

“Well… yeah. Yeah, it is. A bit. You know? You’re always moving around. On tour, concerts here, concerts there. You don’t get a lot of time to really settle down and socialise with people outside the industry, right? I mean, I get along great with all the staff, but… at the end of the day, that’s because they get paid and we have to coexist. And, y’know, in my case it’s a little bit more difficult, since I have to disappear every so often and reinvent myself. New name, new life… by the time I come back, they’re all gone.” She takes a deep, slightly unsteady breath. “Again. And it’s still showbiz on top of that, right? All that pressure, from the fans, from the producers, from yourself. A lot of idols end up… well, drinking’s the least of it. They don’t… they don’t live all that long, you know? Even for ordinary humans. And the media say, oh, they were taken before their time, it’s a tragedy, and it _is_ , but the worst thing is that it’s a _routine_ tragedy. It’s… oh, I really hate this phrase, but it’s the cost of doing business. It’s what they pay to live the dream, and that somehow makes it alright. I try to clean up the industry every time I come back, but it just backslides when I leave again.” Her hands have balled into tight, angry little fists. To have so much spirit, and so much influence, and yet be impotent. “So, um, yeah. I guess… I guess I’m a bit lonely. And tired.”

Nath takes another sip of wine, and finds her glass almost empty. She’s not used to this – to dealing with so much emotion. Even amongst her new friends, Sora and Suguri are fairly subdued, and Hime never fails to be cheerful. If she were the Nath of a year or two ago, she would apologise for touching a nerve, make her excuses, and leave. But she’s not. It sinks in again, in that moment, that she’s changed more in the last year or two than in the thousand before them.

“…looks like we found you just in time, then,” she says, as warmly as she can. “Sora’s not going anywhere. Neither am I, or Suguri, or Hime. Even if you have to do a concert somewhere else, we’re not afraid of some air miles. We’re what you would call–”

“Frequent flyers?” Sham finishes.

“There you go.”

“Hahah… Whoo! That was a tough question to answer honestly.”

“That’s how you know it’s a good one, so I’m told.”

“Well, I _feel_ good for having gotten that off my chest. I think I’m gonna get a drink, though. You want a refill?”

She takes Nath’s glass without waiting for a reply and scurries to the kitchen, all without looking her in the eye. There is a very loud ‘pop’ from the kitchen, and when she returns, the glasses are full of something very pink, bubbly and alcoholic. Nath continues to commune with the spirit of the shag rug, which is the least embarrassed out of any of them. Sham drinks half of her glass at a gulp.

“Alright, my turn!” Sham says, in a voice that perfectly matches her drink. “Just between you and me, do you, um, _get_ Sora? I mean, I’m super happy we found each other again, and it’s fun to hang out with her, but I can’t really work out what’s she’s thinking a lot of the time…”

“Sometimes I do, and sometimes I don’t,” Nath admits. “But I think that’s fine. I don’t think she gets herself sometimes. We’ve had a long time to get to know ourselves and get set in our ways, but she hasn’t had that opportunity.”

It feels right when she says it, although it doesn’t really explain Sora’s baffling trains of thought. Sora, quietly, was changing – trying new things, and becoming accustomed to her new, relaxed lifestyle. That spirit of change had also jerked Nath out of her comfort zone – something she’d grown to appreciate. She’d been comfortable with the old her, the habits and the familiar ways of doing things. But she hadn’t necessarily been _happy_ , and she’d lost the ability or the desire to become somebody who was. It had been Sora – who dragged her along against her will, who pulled childish tricks to make their one-time encounter a more lasting friendship – who changed that.

“Ahaha... Thank goodness. I was scared it was just me… So, do you have a question?”

Nath smiles wryly. After the response she got last time, she almost feels like one question is enough. But she indulges anyway. “You’re really making an album, then?”

“Yeah… Honestly, it’s the first time in a while that I’ve really wanted to do one! Usually, they have to drag me to the recording studio and handcuff me to the mic!”

“Doesn’t seem like a big deal to me. Just take your arms off and walk away. Simple.”

“Pwahaha! I wish I could sometimes. Once you get used to having an audience, it’s hard to go back to recording in a studio. Usually I just pay a songwriter, and I’ve been in a bad habit of recycling old stuff for retro value, but this time I want to write something new.”

“With a piano riff?”

“Hah. I’ll throw one in there somewhere, just for you! That’s what we call fanservice.”

“I thought that was something different.”

Laughing, Sham retreats the kitchen again, and comes back with the bottle this time. Nath gets the sudden, sinking realisation that the only reason Sham has brought it is that she intends to drink it, and she probably does _not_ have the alcohol tolerance she’d need to do that without consequences. So when Sham moves to refill her drink, she puts her hand over her glass and shakes her head. One ten-thousand year old drunk is enough. She’s not sure the world will survive two.

“So, there was one last thing I wanted to know, and then I’ll stop bugging you,” Sham says. “Is that okay?”

Nath rolls her eyes. Not even Hime does quite so much dancing around things. “Sure.”

“Are you into women? I kinda got that impression, but I figured I should check before I totally assume, right?”

It is all Nath can do not to snort. It’s not the first time she’s been asked that question, but the sheer nonchalance of the delivery tickled her.

“Well, I’ve tried a few things over the years – never for too long, but still. I came to the conclusion that it doesn’t really matter, as long as it’s the right person, or the right people.”

She thinks, ultimately, that it’s a mature and even perhaps an obvious viewpoint to take at their advanced age. To grieve is difficult; to be bereaved is even more so. People worth putting yourself through that pain are rare and special, no matter what package they come in. So she expects to see Sham smile, maybe even nod, when she discovers somebody with a similar position to her own.

What she doesn’t expect is the brief puzzled look that flicks across the idol’s face, followed by a gradually dawning expression of pure starry-eyed amazement.

“Wow… the right _people_? I mean, that’s super cool, but I really didn’t have you figured for that kind of thing… I can’t believe I underestimated you that badly!”

“Ah, wait. That isn’t… I mean, it’s not necessarily what I –”

“No, I think it’s really cool! Hey, why don’t we tell date stories? I bet you’ve got some really juicy ones, huh? What’s the worst date you’ve ever been on? This one time I went out with this diplomat, and oh my gosh, he got _so_ drunk that he managed to flush his room key down a restaurant toilet and it almost became this huge international incident, I was super scared at the time but I laughed about it for _years_ afterwards–”

Nath smiles, nods, and tries once again to commune with the spirit of the shag rug, watching carefully as the contents of the bottle disappear, glass by glass. By the time it is three-quarters empty, Sham is curled up on the sofa, giggling herself to sleep under a blanket. No doubt, Nath thinks, she’s going to have an incredible headache when she wakes up in the morning.

Although probably not as big as the headache she’s going to give Nath in the future.


	42. Comfort

It all began when Sora went out for a walk.

Walking, in Hime’s opinion, was just one among the many harmless quirks that made up Sora. She wasn’t one for walking, herself; although she certainly appreciated the _novelty_ of it, flying was quicker, more convenient, and allowed her to mostly sidestep the issue of gravity. She hadn’t realised how used she was to a zero-g environment until she let go of an egg at shoulder-height, believing it would hover there harmlessly, only to discover that Planet Earth had ideas to the contrary.

Sora, though, seemed to enjoy the chance to stretch her legs from time to time. It gave her a chance to see animals that weren’t birds, and the sky looked so much _grander_ from below. She liked the sky to be grand, where possible, and if it wasn’t she would have stern words with the management.

So she had put on her good boots and wandered out into the countryside, and neither Suguri or Hime thought anything of it until dinnertime arrived without Sora in tow. Of course, they told each other, there was nothing to be _worried_ about. It wasn’t like there were any wild animals that could really hurt her, and Sora herself had a remarkably low havoc coefficient without Hime or Sham to act as a catalyst. She had probably just gotten lost.

Despite being highly capable individuals in many areas, both Sora and Suguri frequently became ‘geographically displaced’ (since neither would admit that they lacked a sense of direction). After much thought and teasing, Hime had decided it was an issue with their flight paths. Suguri flew in perfectly straight lines, as clean and efficient as a blast from her laser rifle; unfortunately, much like her laser rifle, she always aimed to just graze her target and avoid any potentially fatal damage, meaning she would skew 15 or so degrees away from wherever she meant to be. Hime herself flew with graceful, curving turns, adjusting gradually as she went, and so she very rarely missed her target.

Sora flew exactly straight, just like Suguri – or so she would tell you. Maybe she even believed it. But the reality was that she would fly straight for a while and then, almost at random, make a sharp, erratic zig-zag before returning to a straight flight path, like an aircraft trying to jink away from pursuit. The problem was that it was a deeply habitual motion, and she didn’t always seem aware that she was doing it; every zig and zag would change her course just a little, and without a navigator to nag her about it, she failed to compensate.

Still, she always made her way back eventually, and she knew the area around the house well enough by now. And every extra hour that she stayed out was another hour that could be devoted to shameless flirting, which was Hime’s favourite kind of flirting.

By nightfall, they had begun to get just a little worried. Suguri was pulling on her boots to go out looking for her, and even Hime was mentally fortifying herself for the process of removing her slippers and putting on real-people shoes, which were much less fluffy and comfortable. They needn’t have bothered, because that was the exact moment the back door swung open, and Sora walked in nonchalantly and sat down at the kitchen table.

Shortly followed by a brace of baby ducks.

“It’s because my hair is the same colour as them,” she explained authoritatively, and Hime realised with a sinking heart that, yes, she really _did_ think that explained everything, and would offer no further details on why she was being followed by a ravenous horde of tiny birds. They stampeded towards her ankles and began to coalesce in a huddle of fluff. “They need names. Can you call Nath? She’s good at names.”

For a moment, Hime considered pointing out that Nath also possessed a cat, who might be an expedient solution to their avian house invasion. But she discarded the thought as being too mean-spirited for teasing, and instead looked to Suguri for guidance and strength. Suguri shrugged; the ducklings needed names, Sora needed dinner, and Suguri was not a girl to turn either out of her house, regardless of how loudly they quacked. Sora wasn’t in the habit of quacking loudly, but her flotilla of ducks were certainly making an attempt, peeping and cheeping with gusto as they raced awkward circles around her feet.

“I take it this is why you’re so late home, then?” Hime asked at last.

“Mm. They only have short legs. I had to stop and wait for them to catch up,” Sora said seriously. The ducks were now making feeble attempts to scale the chair, the tablecloth, and Sora’s calves.

“…What about their mother?” Suguri asked.

“Fox.” She furrowed her brow. “One ran away right as I walked up. Then I saw the ducklings. I wanted to come back and ask what to do, but they started following me. Can we keep them?”

“We’re going to have to. At least for a while. It looks like they’ve imprinted on you, so you’re their mother now.” Suguri spoke slowly as she reached back into her mind for long-forgotten details of animal husbandry. “Since you saved the whole clutch, it probably won’t cause problems when they’re adults, but… we’ll have to start work on a coop tomorrow.”

“I see. I’ll help. I’m good at hammers.”

“I’d be happier if you focused on being good at ducks. Leave the coop to me and Hime. Ah… it’s a good thing we have some seeds left over from the garden. We’ll need to get feed for them tomorrow, too.” She paused and looked at Hime, who had begun to wince slightly with every chirp and peep. “And some earplugs.”

Hime sighed. She rather wished she had been consulted before she had to share her home with a lather of noisy birds. But, she supposed, it wasn’t like Sora had had all that much choice in the matter either. And she’d at least brought home something that was small and cute. She could have brought home a bear. Sora _liked_ bears, so it wasn’t exactly an unlikely possibility.

So she smiled, as Hime often did, and accepted that yesterday they had no pets and today they did, and that was just how the world worked. She poured out a bowl of seeds and watched as Sora tried very hard to get the ducks to eat them, when they were obviously more interested in clambering on her and waddling in circles around wherever she was sitting. When Sora went to bed – tired from her attempts to summon forth her inner duck mom – she watched as the ducklings poured into the hollows in her beanbag next to her body. For a moment, she wondered if it was wise – there might be trouble if Sora rolled over in the night – but then she remembered that the ex-soldier slept as still as a stone. In some ways, she was cut out for duck parenthood.

Eventually, the time came for Hime to retreat to bed herself. As Suguri sorted out the last details on her emergency orders of lumber, nails, netting, nesting boxes, and bird feed, she snuggled down between the covers, and wondered to herself what adventures a brace of baby ducks would bring.

And, idly, if there was anything delicious she could make from duck eggs.

* * *

 

The next morning, Hime was awakened by the sound of Sham pounding on the front door with tiny, frantic fists. Although this should have annoyed her, instead she looked at things with a kind of zen satisfaction; yes, Sham had compromised her beauty sleep, but she had been able to sleep through Suguri sneaking downstairs to begin work on the coop and whatever fresh auditory hell Sora’s ducks were creating in the living room. She had done well, all in all.

“What’s going on?!” Sham wailed, as soon as the door swung open. “Sora called me and she said she’s a mom now and she has _seven_ kids! How?! Why am I not the godmother? This is  _not_ okay!”

Then she pulled Hime into a full-body hug, howling like a woman bereaved. Hime patted her on the back, mumbled something comforting, and steered her into the living room.

There, Sora was sitting cross-legged with her eyes closed, like a statue of Buddha. Three ducklings occupied her lap, there were another two huddled on her upturned palms, one was perched nervously on her right shoulder and one brave duck explorer had colonised the top of Sora’s head. All was perfectly balanced; all was perfectly still. She was one with the duck. She had achieved duck enlightenment, and in record time, too.

“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa,” Sham said, as if she were a balloon and all the air was very quietly escaping from her. “Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa,” she said, looking from Hime to the ducks to Sora and back to Hime. “Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa,” she said, and crumpled to the floor to better observe the tiny feathery creatures Sora was holding. “Aaaaaaaaa.”

“Sham, are you okay? You’re making them nervous.”

“They. Are. _Adoracute_!” Sham hissed in a low whisper. “ _Look_ at them! They’re so small, and fluffy, and… ducks! Oh my gosh I _want_ one!”

“They’re my babies,” Sora said peacefully. “When Nath gets here, you can both name one. Think hard about it.”

“Aye aye!” Sham said with a wink and a mock salute, before immediately barrelling into more questions. “Have you figured out their personalities yet? How did you end up with ducks, anyway? How do _I_ get ducks?”

Sora smiled, and probably would have patted Sham on the head if her hands had not been full of baby ducks. She had acquired her first disciple – no doubt the first of many. Hime left them to it, not entirely sure her sanity would survive the deluge of duck ‘facts’ Sora would soon unleash, and went to see how Suguri was doing with the coop.

Originally, of course, the plan had been that Hime would help with the coop, but they had quickly discovered that Hime had about as much skill with hammers as Suguri had with cooking lobster, which was actually _less_ than zero. Suguri, presented with a lobster in a pot of water, would immediately help it escape as a matter of principle; Hime, presented with a hammer, would immediately drop it into a can of paint.

Still, things were progressing well in her absence. Suguri was never anything less than fast when she put her mind to something, and the coop was already beginning to take shape. She’d already laid a floor, and had made good work on three out of four walls.

“My, my. That girl really is so troublesome,” Hime said by way of greeting. The wood floor of the proto-coop felt sturdy under her feet.

Suguri tapped in another nail: three quick strikes of the hammer, a practised and efficient movement. “You don’t _seem_ troubled.”

She approached slowly and spirited the hammer out of Suguri’s hand, all the better to fold her into a hug. “Yes, well. I would be more troubled if you weren’t so reliable at times like these. I really couldn’t have picked a better person to settle down with.”

“…I feel like that all the time. I’m lucky to have such a good family. Even if they’re troublesome,” Suguri murmured. Her eyes closed contentedly as Hime’s arms drew around her.

“Oh, you. You really can be quite romantic, in your own way… Ah. I know. Since you’ve been working so hard, why don’t you sit down and let me give you a shoulder rub?”

“It’s fine. My shoulders don’t really get sore. If they do, they heal back up again in a few minutes anyway.”

“It’s not a medicinal shoulder rub. Purely recreational. Go on, Suguri. Let me spoil you a little.”

“…Well, it can’t hurt,” Suguri said at last, and smiled wryly. “I’m in your hands.”

“Ufufu… As you should be.”

After a few very enjoyable minutes, she sighed regretfully and left Suguri to her work. She had a guest, after all, which meant she needed to serve tea and biscuits as a bare minimum. Which biscuit was the best was a topic that had almost culminated in familial warfare several times, but it was fine to offer them to guests, whose opinions did not necessarily have to be reflected in their store cupboard. The front door knocked while the kettle came to the boil, and as expected, Nath was the one behind it.

“Hey. Sora rang me this morning. She said she’s a mother now and for me to come over,” she said, rolling her eyes ever so slightly. “Care to bring me up to speed?”

Hime’s smile glittered like a well-polished knife. “I was rather hoping _you’d_ bring _me_ up to speed, actually. I was quite convinced you’d have something to do with it.”

The corners of Nath’s mouth twitched slightly before she wrestled her features back into a carefully neutral position. “…You’re pushing your luck a bit with that one.”

“Duly noted. Now that I think about it, they have Sham’s face anyway. Come in, come in. We have tea and biscuits!”

They returned to the living room, where Sora and her ducks were still in the exact same position. Perhaps they had already begun to mirror their ‘mother’s’ placid personality; perhaps, Hime thought, Sora had glued them in place. Sham, on the other hand, had been presented with sufficient cuteness that she had almost melted into a puddle.

“Ducks?” Nath asked, raising an eyerow.

“Yes, ducks. No doubt your cat will adore you when you get home.”

“He adores me already. I feed him. And he prefers his duck from a packet,” Nath said, shaking her head. “They’re… very sweet.”

“Mm. I’m a duck mom now,” Sora nodded. “Now we can start naming them. Nath, you get to name this one on top of my head, because she’s the tallest.”

“Is she the tallest, though? I think that one in your lap is a little bigger.”

“She _wants_ to be the tallest. That’s what’s important.”

“Is it even a she?”

“Yes,” Sora said, although her expression was more along the lines of _She’d better be._ “Sham, you get the shoulder duck.”

Nath sighed and sat down, her knees creaking. By the time the tea and biscuits were ready, the conversation was already in full flow; Nath was trying to maintain that she didn’t have the incredible naming skills Sora thought she did, while Sora tried to explain why she wouldn’t let Sham call her duck ‘Pancake’. The ducks, roused by the noise and the attention, had begun to cheep. The house suddenly felt very noisy, and very lively.

Hime smiled, as Hime often did, and put in her earplugs. Then, while no-one was paying attention, she took the tea and biscuits to enjoy with Suguri instead.


	43. Chef

Hime was not a remarkable cook – at least, not in the traditional or positive senses. It was a level of accomplishment that she shared with Sora, although for entirely different reasons.

Sora’s great sin in the kitchen was a lack of imagination. She would set out her ingredients, weigh them down to the last gram, open the cookbook, and slavishly follow the instructions until the food was done. If the recipe didn’t tell her to season things, they didn’t get seasoned. If the author assumed there would be a side dish to accompany the meal, it didn’t get made. Sora cooked one thing at one time, exactly how it said in the book, and that was that. That was how she liked it. There was something very comforting about having a set of detailed instructions to follow, and nobody could take that from her.

Hime, on the other hand, would actually adjust her recipes for taste and flavour. Unlike Sora – who, with the application of practice, only got better at following the recipe – Hime actually got better at making food. It would have elevated her to a new plateau of cooking distinction, if Suguri had not foolishly equipped her with a spice rack.

Hime loved her spice rack. It was her mentor, her muse, her oracle. She could tell how the day was going to turn out by how the spices looked in the morning, although the food itself was another matter. With almost every meal she made, she would take anywhere from one to six jars of spices, throw in a random amount of each at random times in the cooking process, and observe the results with the careful neutrality of a scientist. With enough repeated observations, she would eventually be able to draw a conclusion about what each individual spice did, other than ruin the food when combined with random amounts of other spices. It would take a long time, but that was fine. She had a long time to do it.

In another household, Hime’s constant experimentation would have ensured she was relieved of cooking duties in short order. But Suguri had to wrestle for days with even basic recipes, and Sora had grown up with tasteless military ration bars, so any cooked meal was an upgrade. It made every day into a little adventure of its own, and substantiated Sora’s belief that Nath – who possessed more or less a normal, human palate – was a gourmet without equal.

Still, there was a limit to how haphazard Hime could be in the kitchen, and Suguri believed they had gone past it.

“Hime,” she asked, gently, “is something on your mind?”

“Oh, you could tell? You do know me so well, Suguri.”

Suguri looked down at her bacon and eggs, and said nothing, which was the objectively correct thing to say. They had sprinkles on them. Not sprinkles of sage or parsley, which would have been par for the course, but the colourful sugary kind that usually went on ice cream, and of which they had many, many jars. She wasn’t sure ‘crunchy and sweet’ was the correct flavour profile for a fried egg, but that was the one that hers was going to have, and she would eat it anyway because she loved Hime and was the perfect lab rat for her cooking experiments. But she wanted to know _why_.

“I was in the middle of making breakfast and I just found my mind wandering, you know?” Hime continued, reaching for a salt shaker that might, on further inspection, have contained sugar.

“On which topic?”

“Oh, you know. All sorts of.. ineffable things.” She waved her hand airily. “The beauty of the natural world, the feeling of being in a loving home, human ingenuity. Things like that. Humans really can make the most amazing things, can’t they?”

Suguri raised an eyebrow. Hime’s fondness for humans was news to her; if she had asked Hime to rate the human race on a scale of one to ten, she would have given them a seven at best. They were charming creatures, of course, but Hime generally complained that they weren’t all that entertaining, that they bred too much, and that they were just a little too susceptible to horrific spaceship accidents. Horrific spaceship accidents were a part of Hime’s life that she never spoke too much about, but Suguri had surmised she had seen at least a few; over ten thousand years, the chances of not having an accident or two was within kissing distance of zero, and _all_ spaceship accidents were horrific by default.

“For example,” she said, “did you know that they can _deep-fry_ ice cream now? Isn’t that amazing? Sham told me she’d eaten some at a fair once, and I’ve been thinking about it all week. It _has_ to be witchcraft of some kind. It must be.”

Deep fried ice cream didn’t seem very ineffable, at least to Suguri. It seemed like more of a party trick, a novelty food you ate once and then very wisely did not subject your body to a second time. It seemed like it would do funny things to your organs, and she was quite fond of her organs. Quite fond of Hime’s organs too, if it came to that. But she was also quite fond of Hime’s eyelashes, which were fluttering in such a way as to suggest a hint was very graciously being bestowed upon her, and it would be a mark of great wisdom to seize it. _Think of the brownie points you’ll get_ , Hime’s eyelashes said. _Think of the opportunity to go out for breakfast instead of eating an egg with sprinkles on it. It’ll be a date and an adventure all rolled into one._

They were, on reflection, very persuasive eyelashes.

“Well…” Suguri trailed off, her gaze shifting to the window. She could see Sora’s duck coop standing proudly in the back garden, half-painted in a traditional barnyard red. As of late Sora had taken to sleeping there, because the ducks tried to follow her out when she went to wish them goodnight. She was very serious about wishing her ducks goodnight. They couldn’t sleep without it, she said, despite all evidence to the contrary. “Well.”

“Well, what?”

“Well… we’d better get our coats.”

To see Hime smile like she did then was not, particularly, a rare thing. But it was just as beautiful every time it happened.

* * *

 

The search for deep fried ice cream took longer than expected, but eventually led them to a tavern with a roaring fire. It was a little odd for the fire to be roaring in spring, but it _was_ a blustery day, and if either Suguri or Hime had been beholden to the usual laws of aerodynamics they would no doubt have been blown off course.

As soon as they sat down (on real, genuine chairs, not the motley collection of furniture that passed for sitting apparatus at home), Hime immediately seized the children’s menu and began to paw through it with relish. One of her favourite Earth customs – besides filling the internet with cat videos, and naked apron – was their odd habit of putting cartoon cowboys on children’s menus. If pressed, she’d have guessed that cowboy menus outnumbered their non-cowboy counterparts by four to one, and she can’t help but wonder why. Maybe the murky world of professional catering was being manipulated by a shadowy council of retired ranch hands – a cowboy cabal, if you would.

Suguri didn’t know anything about cowboy cabals, which probably indicated that they didn’t exist. Cowboys weren’t known for their stealth, because they were obligated to wear spurs on their shoes that gave them away. They were also usually in the company of horses and/or cows, which, as stealth-equipped animals went, probably weren’t in the top ten. The idea that a group of cowboys, with the ensuing group of animals, could maintain enough sneakiness to create a monopoly on children’s menu branding seemed preposterous.

Mostly she was occupied with picking something to eat, preferably from the adult menu. Everything came with a side of something, which she hated. She just wanted to order a thing and then get the thing, rather than the thing and then three more things she didn’t really want. She wondered if she could get away with just ordering the deep-fried ice cream and skipping the rest of the meal; Hime would probably permit it in the short term, but it _would_ make it less of a date. She was also a little hungry, having abandoned her besprinkled egg to the gods of the kitchen before they left. If she was lucky, Sora would wander in and eat it out of sheer curiosity before they got back.

“What are you going to have?” she asked.

Hime peeked at her over the menu and fluttered her eyelashes, a skill she had put many hours of practice into. She was a master of menu-peeking, brushing her foot against her partner’s ankles under the table, and other miscellaneous romantic talents. “Well, I was thinking we could something to share.”

Suguri blinked. In her heart – in the heart of every human, enhanced or otherwise – was encoded a genetic cultural memory of two animated dogs enjoying a plate of spaghetti in a back alley. This wasn’t a back alley, and mostly she opposed eating in back alleys for hygiene reasons, and also the tavern did not serve spaghetti. But it did serve ice cream sundaes, the kind in the tall glasses that were secretly designed to feed a family of four. They could eat one between them. All they had to do was ask for two spoons. But was she brave enough, or crazy enough, to have a whole meal made of nothing but ice cream? How far would she go to win Hime’s affections?

“Oh, don’t be silly,” Hime replied when she brought it up. “I appreciate the thought, but you haven’t had any breakfast. If all you eat for the day is ice cream, you’ll hurt your stomach. Just get something you like and I’ll pick at it.”

“You’re sure?”

“Oh, absolutely. It’ll help me keep my weight down. Sham has told me quite emphatically that food taken from somebody else’s plate has no calories whatsoever, and she’s as good an authority as any.”

This was almost certainly a joke, but Suguri frowned anyway. Hime didn’t need to worry about her weight. She _had_ put on a pound of two, but nobody with Hime’s love of ice cream could stay the same weight forever. And besides, if Hime gained weight, it meant there was objectively more Hime in the world. That could never be an entirely negative thing, although it would make the world marginally more dangerous.

“Still, I am curious,” Hime continued. “If we order a hamburger or a t-bone steak, do you think they’ll send a cowboy to deliver it?”

Suguri frowned more deeply. Hime’s insistence on cowboys in the kitchen was starting to worry her. She had previously made clumsy attempts at providing breakfast in bed, and those attempts would only become clumsier if Hime forced her to wear a cowboy hat and silver spurs while she was cooking.

In the end, dinner was not served by a cowboy. Suguri chose the very simplest thing on the menu, and Hime ate two thirds of it, presumably enjoying her calorie free lifestyle. There were no spaghetti-related kissing mishaps, although Suguri would not personally had said no to them if they’d been in a less public arena. She was still discovering her personal tolerance for displays of affection, public or otherwise; apart from her need for a hug in the morning to get her motor started, she wasn’t a clingy kind of romantic.

Then, the moment of truth arrived. The waiter approached, the question of dessert already forming on his lips. Suguri looked at her partner over the table, and motioned with her eyes: _You can do the honours._

“Why, yes, we’d love a dessert,” Hime purred. “Can I get… oh, I don’t know. One of those big sundaes, please, to share.”

Suguri didn’t gasp, but she definitely thought about gasping. Certainly, she found her mouth very slightly open in confusion. Hime had a look of silky satisfaction on her face, as if she had masterfully executed a beautiful prank.

“Well,” she said a little primly, “I _did_ think it was quite a romantic idea, especially since I know you sometimes struggle with that kind of thing… You really do try your best to make our dates as lovely as possible, and I’m very lucky to have a partner who takes the effort to do that.”

“But… the ice–”

“And besides, it means I have a reason to drag you out for another date later. Just because I’m not eating the deep-fried ice cream this visit, it doesn’t mean I’ll give up.”

Suguri closed her mouth, swallowed, and found she was smiling. Maybe even blushing. She fixed her gaze somewhere in the rafters, which were old and carved from pleasing rugged boughs of wood. “…I don’t…think we need an excuse to go on dates.”

Hime’s smile was brilliant. “Well said! But it’s never bad to have one. Otherwise, we might get caught ducksitting for Sora.”

In due time, the sundae was delivered, with a pair of long-handled spoons to enjoy it with. Gleefully, Hime scooped up the first spoonful of cream and held it out towards Suguri.

As she begrudingly opened her mouth, Suguri thought that maybe it was a good thing she couldn’t talk at that particular moment in time. The things going through her head were painfully, painfully corny – but nonetheless true.

A sweet treat was fine once in a while. But having a sweetheart was better still.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And with that goofy little interlude, we're all caught up to the present day!


	44. Air Hockey

Nath was bemused. Nowadays, she seemed to spend her time in a near-constant state of bemusement, bordering on surprise. The introduction of Sora, and all the miscellaneous nonsense associated with her, seemed to ensure that. But today she was _particularly_ bemused, and it was all Sham’s fault.

Sham, it seemed, had an inborn talent for making Nath feel wrong-footed, and she had demonstrated it that morning by turning up at her home and declaring that they were ‘besties’, a status that entitled her to hang around in Nath’s apartment and stroke her cat. Quite when they’d become besties was a mystery; Nath assumed it had happened when she went to Sham’s house for the evening, but as she recalled, not much had happened besides Sham playing the piano and drinking herself under the table, mostly without outside intervention. If she could solve all her problems like that, Nath might have taken work as a diplomat.

Still, the sentiment seemed genuine even if it had apparently come from outer space; the odd tension that she always seemed to feel between Sham and herself had disappeared, to be replaced mostly by Sham being noisy. Roger also seemed quite happy with this new and very affectionate member of his fan club – not that Nath would ever allow the cat’s feelings to dictate her own responses, of course. So she had sighed, and shrugged, and accepted that Sham was just her bestie now and that was how life worked. It was a free upgrade, like when there was a mistake in your restaurant order and they threw in a side salad free of charge. She’d gotten Sham _à_ _la mode_ with her serving of Sora _du jour,_ and all she had to do was sit back and enjoy it.

That, by itself, was apparently not enough for life to throw at her; within fifteen minutes of Sham knocking on her door, Sora was letting herself in through the balcony window. Nothing had been arranged. Nothing was planned. They had just independently decided to turn up unannounced within minutes of each other. Nath chalked it up to them sharing the same bizarre wavelength.

“Good morning, Sham,” Sora said as she closed the window behind her. If she thought anything was at all out of the ordinary, her voice didn’t betray it. “I see you’ve met Roger.”

Sham had indeed met Roger, and was currently wearing him as a hat. Or perhaps Roger had just commandeered her as a mount. It was difficult to tell with that cat. In her heart, Nath believed he was a simple animal; he had an openness to his face, a pleasant directness when he wanted food. But he did seem to have an abnormal gift for manipulating anybody within ten feet of him. Not, of course, that she had ever experienced such manipulation herself.

“Do I not get a good morning?” she grumbled as Sora sat down.

“Nath mornings are always good mornings.”

“Ohhhh.” Sham nodded her head as she imbibed this great Soratic wisdom.

“What does that even _mean_?” Nath asked, although she knew better than to expect a response. Sora was already raiding the cupboards for cereal. She didn’t particularly _like_ cereal; she had apparently had a bad experience with it under Suguri’s care. But she liked to watch Roger lap up all the milk after she was done eating, so whenever she came over she would bravely help herself to a bowl of sugar-enhanced processed grain from Nath’s supply.

“What’s our plan for today?” she asked in-between mouthfuls.

“I think,” Sham said, after a moment of intense thought, “we should go out and do something super fun!”

This, to Sora, seemed like it had all the makings of a fine plan. It was simple, elegant, and endlessly applicable. A plan like that came about only very rarely, although thankfully they were very easy to recycle. If Suguri had taught her anything, it was that recycling was Important.

Nath, needless to say, was less enthused with the plan. _Her_ plan had been to spend the day relaxing in the comfort of her own home, probably in minimal clothing, and start sorting out her summer trip for the year. Instead, here she was, watching her cat pilot Sham around the apartment and waiting for Sora to finish eating her cereal. She began to press for more details.

“What do you mean, what’s fun? Come on, Nat. You’re old enough to know what fun is!” Sham replied, her voice sparkling.

Nath’s eyebrow, a harbinger of impending doom, began to raise. “Did you just call me ‘Nat’?”

“Well, we’re besties, so I have to give you a nickname, right? Besides, it’s shorter.”

“My name is _one syllable_. You’re not even saving any time.”

“Oh, sure I am. I know! You can call me Shae-Shae.”

“That’s _longer_ than your actual name!”

Exasperated, Nath looked to Sora for an intervention; when none came, she looked to Roger instead. Obligingly, the cat trickled down from his perch on Sham’s cranium and landed on the table, the better to lap up his tribute of milk. Never before had Nath felt so powerless in her own home.

Still, the price she paid for having interesting friends was an interesting life. So she sighed, tickled the cat under the chin, and prepared for another chaotic day.

* * *

 

Sham, having apparently been promoted to trip advisor, had promised to bring them to the funnest place she knew. Instead, she had delivered them to what appeared to be just a solid wall of noise.

Technically, the whole construction was a barcade, but it had, at some point, had a bowling alley clumsily grafted on in a feat of architectural mad science. Both parts of this Frankenstein’s monster seemed to be doing good business, based on the amount of sound they produced. There were glasses being clinked, pins being bowled, little bursts of exultation for lucky strikes and moans of sympathy for gutterballs. Down in the arcade pit, mock motorcycles revved their digital engines through tinny speakers, light gun booths echoed with the simulated groans of the living dead, and always, always, there was the inimitable ‘tink’ of pitched battle at the air hockey table.

It was, generally speaking, the kind of place Nath didn’t step into in the light of day. Almost everything there was pretty dependent on having hands and some level of manual dexterity to go with them; until recently she had entirely lacked the first, and her supplies of the second were still dangerously low. When she raised the issue to Sham and Sora, she found them less than sympathetic.

“It’s okay. I believe in you,” Sora said, although she was more than a little distracted by a twelve year old girl shooting a zombie in the face. She didn’t really know how to feel about it; on one hand, it was a child shooting an imaginary gun, which was really too close to the whole ‘child soldiers’ thing as far as she was concerned, and she was still a little iffy about things that related too closely to any kind of apocalypse, zombie or not. But the gun sounds were goofy and cartoony enough not to make her feel uncomfortable, and it _had_ been a while since she had shot anything in the face. Was there still a place in her life for recreational face shooting? She thought there might be. It was a conundrum.

“I know, right?! Come on, Nath. I bet if you put half as much effort into these games as you do at pretending to be grumpy, you’ll be a master in no time!”

“I don’t _pretend_ to be grumpy,” she protested. “I _am_ grumpy.”

Sora and Sham exchanged a look, then rolled their eyes simultaneously. This, Nath decided, was unacceptable. There was being on the same wavelength, and then there was _weaponising_ it.

“Well, anyway! If you’re not confident with your hands, we can play with your feet! Come on, Sora. Let’s take her to the dance pads and teach her to love the boogie!”

“Roger.”

“Hey. I’ll go the dance pads with you, but you leave my feet alone. I need them in case the whole ‘hands’ thing doesn’t work out.”

Sora tilted her head. “Oh. I don’t think I’ve seen your naked feet before. That’s weird.”

“First of all, it’s _bare_ feet, _not_ naked. Secondly, why would it be weird for you to not have seen my feet?”

“I don’t know. It feels like I would have.”

“…You probably did, come to think of it. I went barefoot at the beach.”

“Ufufufu. She was probably looking at the other naked bits.”

“ _Sham_.”

“What? I was talking about your tummy! I know that’s what _I_ was looking at. You have super great definition, you know? To be honest, I’m jealous. You ought to show it off more often! Come on, let’s have some body positivity! We’ll be the tummy liberation station–”

“ _ **Sham.**_ ”

Luckily, Sham had not quite finished digging her own grave before they reached the dance machines, and by the time she had breathlessly explained them to Sora, any murderous impulses Nath might have felt had been dissolved by the idol’s cheerful enthusiasm. As much as Sham seemed to have a talent for getting under her skin – and it was a talent she seemed to be using with gleeful abandon – it was hard to stay mad at her. It would be like staying mad at a cat – unpleasant, and ultimately pointless.

“I don’t know if I’ll be good at this,” Sora said as Sham started scrolling through the charts. “I don’t know many dances. Is there one that’s a rave? I know how to rave. Hime taught me.”

“Don’t worry about how good you are. Just try and have fun! Ooh, they’ve got one of my songs on here! Oh, but it’s _that_ remix… ick. Ah, I guess I should pick one at a lower difficulty… Here, here! Nath, pick between these two for your first dance!”

Nath looked at the screen, and then glanced at Sora. “...I don’t suppose there’s any way I can get out of this, is there?”

Sora shook her head solemnly. So she sighed, and very gingerly put a foot on the dance pad. It seemed stable enough, even when she put her weight on it, but it was difficult to trust any machine If she didn’t know what it was rated for. The cost of a replacing it if it broke wasn’t that much of an issue to her, but getting a reputation as the woman who broke it would annoy her to no end.

“What’s wrong?” Sham asked. “It’s not like it’s gonna break.”

“Easy for you to say. I’m heavy.”

“Mm,” Sora chimed in. “You can’t suplex her, even if you try.”

“Why, exactly, do you want to suplex me, Sora?”

“I don’t _want_ to suplex you,” she replied innocently. “But there’s people you can suplex, and people you can’t. That’s how it is.”

Nath thought about this, and decided that if she had been put on the grand cosmic list of people who did not have to fear being randomly suplexed by Sora, she wasn’t going to argue about it. Sora’s mind worked in strange and mysterious ways; any protest might get her unsuplexableness revoked. When the music began, Nath got the sudden sensation that she and Sham lived in completely different worlds. It wasn’t a rare feeling, although usually the world Sham ostensibly lived in was fairyland. But in the rarefied environment of a dance battle, she was an undisputed queen. She moved with energy, efficiency, aplomb; apparently the chart really _was_ too easy for her, because she was finding time to do a completely different dance in between the inputs. Meanwhile, it was all Nath could do to stiffly follow the chart as best she could, each motion a slow and individual effort in comparison with the flowing way that Sham moved. Sometimes she lost the beat entirely, and found herself waiting for long, frustrated seconds while the notes scrolled off the screen before she found a place to step back in. When the song finally ended, the gulf between their scores was embarrassing.

“Ahhh… that was a blast! I really got into it. You did super well for your first time, too!” Sham’s face was flushed, and she seemed to have worked up a sweat despite herself. If she was lying, she was at least doing a good job of it. “Sora, you try next!”

Thankfully for Nath’s wounded pride, Sora had wandered off in the direction of the air hockey table, and was watching with interest as a thirteen year old girl soundly trounced her father in pitched battle. The girl was weaker and her shots less accurate, but she was craftier, less predictable, and didn’t have three decades of wear and tear on her central nervous system to slow down her reactions. Perhaps they were witnessing the birth of a future champion, a colossus who would usher in the golden age of air hockey. Sora liked to think so. In her heart, everybody had the potential to be a protagonist.

“Sora! So this is where you got to. You didn’t want to watch us dance?” Sham asked, trying to sound hurt. It was hard to sound sad through a cocktail of adrenaline and endorphins, but she tried.

Sora finished saying goodbye to the future air hockey champion of the world, and faced her friends with an expression that was more puzzled than troubled. “Oh, you finished already? That’s strange. Did the machine break?”

“Ahaha… A standard track only lasts three to four minutes, you know?”

“Oh.” Sora’s brow furrowed. “Whenever Hime dances, it takes an hour, at least. I thought I had more time.”

“You shouldn’t base your expectations on Hime,” Nath said, smiling faintly. “She’s not exactly a normal person.”

“That’s right. She’s better than normal.”

“Well, I won’t say anything about that. But you’ll be disappointed if you expect everybody to act like she does.”

“I see.” After accepting this version of reality to be the one she currently inhabited, Sora’s eyes flicked to the air hockey table. “Sham, let’s play this one. It looks fun.”

Sham grinned and cracked her knuckles, which elicited concern from Sora and mild jealousy from Nath. But what it _should_ have elicited was pure, unbridled fear. Sham’s knuckles were the sound that robots heard before they became coffee machines. It was the sound her managers heard when she wanted to stop being a cute, easily manipulated idol and start talking _business._ It was the sound perverts heard before they discovered that, contrary to popular belief, the security detail was _not_ there to protect a retired ten-thousand-year-old soldier from people who had never once fired a missile. The crowd thought they were, and even the security team thought they were, but they _weren’t_ , and Sham had a way of reminding people. It was, in fact, a very scary sound.

The fact of the matter was that Sora had bitten off more than she could chew. Over the millennia, Sham had played air hockey on at least three – maybe even _five!_ – occasions, whereas Sora had played it a sum total of zero. So it followed that her skill was infinitely more than Sora’s, since there was no multiple of zero that could ever reach the lofty heights of five. That was how maths worked, and Sham believed in the unlimited power of arithmetic.

“How about a bet?” she asked, spinning the… strikey, paddle… hitting _thing_ with her fingertips. “If _I_ win, you have to do whatever I say for a whole day.”

Sora nodded as she ambled to the other side of the table. “Okay. If I win, you have to buy me a root beer float. No, wait. You have to buy us _all_ root beer floats.”

“Wait,” Nath interrupted, her eyes narrowed. “This doesn’t seem like a balanced bet.”

“Is three root beer floats too many?”

“Your end’s fine. Sham’s seems a little… exploitable.”

“Gumumu… You’re just jealous. You want to monopolise her side-tufts for yourself, don’t you?! I understand! They’re super charming! Totally irresistible! You just want to twirl them around your fingers whenever you see them! But you can’t get in the way of our bet, Nath. I’m going to win, and then her side tufts will be mine to do as I like with!”

Sora and Nath reacted with the only emotion appropriate: complete confusion.

“Sham, you’d make a great supervillain,” Sora said seriously, apparently determined to see her friend in the most positive light.

“Yes, well. If you win, I’m making sure your twenty-four hours get spent under my or Suguri’s supervision, since apparently you need a responsible adult.”

“That’s not fair,” Sham sniffed. She considered pouting, but didn’t consider it warranted. Sora had a pout that was effective; Hime’s, reputedly, was weapons-grade. Sham’s was against the Geneva Convention and needed two separate launch codes to operate, both of which were, unfortunately, in her possession. “It’s _our_ bet. You don’t get to add rules.”

“But she’s the referee,” Sora said, as if it were something she had ever mentioned at any point in time before that exact second.

But now she had said it, it was so: Nath was the referee, and had been since the dawn of time. She had never been anything but the referee, which was very inconvenient for her. Having danced for Sham’s amusement and therefore discharged her duties as a ‘bestie’, she had been considering sidling off to the bar bit of the barcade and grumbling at their prices. The bar owners would believe she was grumpy, even if her friends refused to. But, having become the referee, she had no choice but to watch the match and… well, refer, ostensibly to a set of rules she didn’t actually know. It did allow her to impose a semblance of sanity on Sham’s betting, which was a mercy and a blessing to all concerned.

There was a coin flip to decide who served first. Sham picked heads, and won; Sora stared off into space, seemingly lost in her own thoughts. Perhaps she was planning a grand strategy. Perhaps she was calculating angles, engaging in a rousing session of sports psychology. It wouldn’t matter. Sham knew, in her heart of hearts, that she was going to win, and she was going to win because she wanted it _more_. The prize was an opportunity to poke Sora’s cheeks and twiddle her side-tufts and do all sorts of fun activities, most of which she could probably sneak past Nath.

With that noble desire in her heart, she gave the puck just the lightest, gentlest tap, and then immediately swiped it into a banked shot that went hurtling towards Sora’s goal, bouncing off the metal bumpers with a resounding ‘tink’.

Sora’s hand moved. It _must_ have moved, because her striker appeared directly in the puck’s path. But Sham didn’t see the motion; it was in one place, and then in the other, like an animation skipping frames. There was another judder, a moment where her hand was lost in motion, and then the puck was screaming back to Sham’s end of the table, clattering off the sides and rebounding too fast for her to keep track of. In a split second it had smacked into the back of her goal as she stood, thunderstruck, not even attempting to defend. Was she imagining the smell of melting plastic? Probably. But she couldn’t be _sure_ , and that terrified her on a deep existential level.

Across the table, Sora’s smile was perfect and guileless. It had every right to be. She hadn’t lied. She hadn’t tricked anyone. She just knew things they didn’t, and one of those things was that there was a level of power that no amount of experience could outweigh. It was a level of power she happened to possess. Times changed and people changed, but her specifications, as always, were extraordinary.

Another thing she knew, and which she proceeded to teach Sham over the course of seven blistering goals, was that it didn’t matter how outrageous your opponent’s bet was if you could be sure you would win. As far as Sora was concerned, there had been no bet. Sham had just promised to buy three root beer floats at the end of the game, and that was that.

As the last goal sank home, Sham momentarily broke sporting etiquette and sought a comforting hug from the referee. Unusually, she got one. Even Nath – still smarting from her dance pad experience – couldn’t turn her away after a defeat like that. It would have been animal cruelty.

“There’ll be side-tufts another day,” she said, awkwardly patting the idol on the back. And she was right: Sora’s side-tufts had survived war and calamity. They would endure. She didn’t know if she could say the same about Sham, who looked like she needed rather more than a root beer float to make the world look okay again.

“It was a good game,” Sora said, to nobody in particular. “Nath, you should try.”

Like an old sailor casting their eyes to the stars, Nath cast her eyes to Sora’s chin, and her augury revealed that, no, she would not be getting out of playing air hockey, just like she wasn’t allowed to get out of dancing. Her mind went back to the last time she’d come up against Sora in a sporting event; she’d come home with broken prosthetics, and Sora had been one well-aimed blue slushie away from doing the same to her arm.

“…Alright. But I think you’re a bit too tough for me. Sham, can I play you instead?”

The idol’s eyes, which previously had been welling with tears of frustration, became sly. “Sure! But if I win, you have to do what I say for a day.”

“Why on earth… I can understand Sora, but why me?” She shook her head and held up a hand to stop Sham from answering. She wasn’t sure she really wanted to know. “No deal. If you win, I’ll buy you a drink. If I win, you buy me a drink. That’s as much as I’m betting.”

Sora, having assumed the holy title of referee, nodded on Sham’s behalf. “I’ll play the winner. Try your best.”

Nath and Sham looked at each other, and exchanged conspiratorial – if slightly shaky – smiles as they assumed their positions. Technically, Sham had the advantage, but it didn’t matter. They would hold their heads high as competitors, pull no punches, and try their very, very best.

To lose.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'll probably take a hiatus from OJ stories for a while. One of the things that porting to AO3 has put into perspective is just how much I've written. There's over 100,00 words of Suguri/Sora fic (which is a novel by itself!), 40k words of QP stories, and various drips and drabs elsewhere; furthermore, between my various drafts and stories I haven't posted because they're commissions or other reasons, total wordcount is in excess of 200k. Lately I've been feeling more and more burnt out on the series, and experiments with writing for new things go much easier than doing stuff for OJ, so I think it's time for some new projects. I do intend to do more OJ fic when I feel more refreshed, but after literal years of writing barely anything else, I think I've earned a break.


	45. Sultry

“Nath, you’re flushed. Are you okay?”

Sham presses a hand against her forehead, and her palm feels blissfully cool by comparison. Outside, the weather is outrageously hot, the kind of rich, clingy heat that wraps itself around you and makes you long for escape. In the gym, it’s even worse; Nath is only wearing a pair of shorts and a vest top, but it feels like she’s huddled up in a parka. In the corridor, vending machines hum enticingly, and every so often Sora or Sham will go out to feed their change to them. Earlier, they were fighting over the privilege. Sora wants to try all the different isotonic glucose drinks. Sham just loves vending machines in a way that is slightly baffling.

But for all her oddities, the idol has something that none of Nath’s other friends seem to have: the ability, or the willingness, to open herself emotionally at any moment. Half a minute ago, she was laughing and giggling; now her manner is almost motherly as she gently wipes Nath’s forehead with a damp towel.

“Sora, I don’t think she’s well. We should get her home…”

Leaning back against the weight machine, Nath says nothing. Sham is wrong and she is right; she wants to go home, but not because she’s ill.

“Let me see.” Sora’s voice is not the voice of a woman concerned for her friend’s well-being. She leans in and presses her brow against Nath’s, her eyes wide open and watchful. For just a moment, her face takes up Nath’s entire world; it is oddly private, even though Sham is only a few feet away. The scent of green apple lingers in her hair. “I think,” she pronounces, after a moment that seems eternal, “she’s fine. Nath’s just enjoying the workout.”

Her interest apparently lost, she returns to the kettlebells. Like Sham, she’s wrong and right at the same time. To be honest, the exercise isn’t really doing anything for Nath. Most of it is targeted for her arm muscles, which, of course, don’t exist. But she’d gotten an excited call from her lab geeks telling her they had made a breakthrough, based on the technology Sham lent them; the new arms, they promised, would be stronger, more responsive, and have no compatibility issues. They would even be molded to more closely fit her body shape, unlike the slightly twiggy ones she had now. They just needed some calibration data. So they had inserted a sensor into her prosthetics, given her a gym routine, and now here she was, in Frankford’s Leisure Centre, passively lifting weights in a baking hot room with Sora and Sham along for the ride.

She is enjoying _a_ workout, though. Just not hers. Sora’s, on the other hand, she’s enjoying more than is comfortable, or morally permissible.

A little more than a year ago, she and Sora had had a boxing match here – to test her prosthetics, ironically enough. It was a good day out; there had been sports, derring-do, ice cream, and she had basically adopted a cat at the end of it, although Sora had also almost put her in traction. At the time, she had felt… stirrings, here and there, of an attraction that was more far more physical than what had come before. But it was manageable. She’d been in control of the situation.

The situation has changed.

In the past year or so, she’s accepted that Sora is special to her in a way that is not _particularly_ platonic. If somebody asked her right now, “When did you fall in love with Sora?”, she wouldn’t answer. But the answer, she has realised, _exists_ , and now she’s trying to figure out what to do about it. In the meantime, her new perception of her friend – as somebody she desires, who is desirable, and who may have desires of her own – has quietly begun to cause trouble.

It would have been fine, she thinks, if Sora hadn’t chosen to wear skintight exercise clothes. Sora at rest is soft and doughy and loveable, a puffy cloud of a person who wanders hither and thither in long dresses and whose train of thought doesn’t turn at the signal. Sora in motion is an entirely different beast. When she moves, there are glimpses of something – a sense that under her peaceful exterior, there is something lithe and fierce and powerful stretching after a long sleep, and Nath _likes_ it. She doesn’t necessarily _want_ to like it, at least not as obviously as she does, but on a very primal level, the idea of an active Sora reaches into some very interesting parts of her and gives them a bit of a tickle.

Sora, in motion _and_ in skintight clothing, is actually just cheating in Nath’s humble opinion. Mankind was not meant to have access to Sora’s pure, unrefined silhouette. You’re not supposed to be able to imagine her butt in glorious detail, or all the very enjoyable things you could do with such a butt if given access to it. But Nath is. She can’t _not_. She doesn’t know how on earth Sham is dealing with it, or why everybody else in the gym is not openly salivating the way she’s afraid she might be, but personally speaking it’s been very hard to focus on her reps with the knowledge that Sora is exercising and in the same room as her.

Sham doesn’t know any of this. Or, if she does, she’s hiding it. The expression painted on her face is concern, pure and simple. “I don’t know, Sora… I’ve never seen her go red like this before.”

“I have.”

“Really? When?”

Mercifully, Sora doesn’t answer, and instead starts her exercises again. Nobody is more excited about their day at the gym than her. Nath came out of obligation; Sham, whose ability to fill herself with snacks is no longer being counteracted by the calorie burn of an idol routine, came out of prudence. Sora is here for the sheer joy of exercise. She’s been left adrift in a body capable of things no modern athlete can ever hope to match, and no way to stretch herself. Even hard exercise is a poor substitute for the rush of combat, but it’s _something._

Suguri and Hime have given her a perfect, peaceful life; she loves her garden, her ducks, and her friends. But Nath can tell she’s missing something. There are parts of her that are still asleep; they are dangerous, but they’re _her._ She needs to express them, but she can’t. Suguri and Hime won’t let her play-fight, at least not often; she’s too boisterous, too excitable, too competitive. Too uncontrolled. It’s hard to argue with them. They are old, and wise, and responsible for the people around them; give Sora another year or two to calm down, they say, and then she can play all she wants.

It’s the sensible way to handle things. But lately, Nath wonders if it’s the _correct_ one. Suguri and Hime have the wisdom of ancients. A year or two is nothing to them, in the grand scheme of things. But for Sora, a year is a year. Time does not elide for her the way it does for her friends. In the meantime, she is frustrated, yearning for something she cannot reach. More and more, Nath finds herself wanting to do something about it. She just isn’t sure what. Time has quite effectively dis-armed her; even if she wanted to play with Sora in the sky, she no longer has the weapons.

All that can wait for another day. A day that’s not roasting hot. A day where the profile of Sora’s ass hasn’t been seared into her mind for future enjoyment, and she can do anything without feeling like a giant barrel of sweat and hormones. For now, she needs a cold drink, and a chance to cool off in other ways. After reassuring Sham with a clumsy pat on the head, she retreats to the comfort (and relative coolness) of the vending machines. 

* * *

 

“Nath. Are you sure you’re okay?”

She looks up and Sora is staring down at her, her hair shaggy and her skin glowing with exertion. There is a certain sense of satisfaction in her stance, even as she furrows her brow. It must be nice to get that much enjoyment out of something as simple as lifting weights.

With only a small sigh, Nath hauls herself to her feet. She’s been sitting next to the vending machine, enjoying the feeling of the cool wall against her back. Nobody’s been for drinks in almost ten minutes; she feels cooler, calmer, and refreshed. “Yes. I’m good.”

“I was worried. You were gone for a while.”

“Couldn’t decide what I wanted.”

Sora looks at her face and narrows her eyes. “I bet… you want an iced tea.”

“These vending machines don’t sell iced tea.”

“But you want one.”

“Well, I do _now_ , because you’ve said it.”

“See?” Sora folds her arms, pleased with the results of her prognostication. “We can go out for iced tea when we’re done. I’ll treat you.”

Nath smiles wryly. Sora gets an allowance from Suguri every month, and guards it jealously. Functionally it is limitless, because if she ever needed more Suguri would give it to her, but she never does. Instead she keeps to that one figure as if it were set in stone, and as if her friends were not living off ten thousand years of accumulated wealth and interest. To receive an iced tea from her is (supposedly) a great honour, because that money was earmarked for more important things, like notebooks with bears on them. She’s begun collecting them, with the aim of getting one with every kind of bear.

Knowing that Sora won’t go back until she’s picked a drink, Nath lazily scans the selection and picks something that claims to taste of sour apple. As she quickly checks she doesn’t need any of the coins she’s spending for her collection, she feels Sora’s hand slip into hers.

For a moment, they are both still.

“Sora… you okay?” Nath asks. There is… _something_ in the air. Like a soap bubble she’s trying not to pop. Sora stands at her left shoulder, and she can see the top of the girl’s head out of the corner of her eye. It feels like it would be wrong to look directly at her face.

“Muu.” It’s been a while since Nath heard that noise – Sora’s little nonsense sound for when she’s frustrated, or searching for what to say. “You’re getting new hands soon, right?”

“Well… fingers crossed.”

“So there’s not a lot of time left to hold these ones.” A pause. “It’s a rare opportunity.”

‘A rare opportunity’… She’s heard Sora say those words before. Last time they visited the leisure centre. At the time, Sora had wanted to hold hands as they went for ice cream after the fight, but she’d made an excuse not to. Sora… hadn’t tried again, after that.

The hand in hers is warm, rough with calluses from gardening and weapons training. A little sweaty, too. But it’s Sora’s, and this time, she’ll take what she can get. She squeezes gently. “You know you can hold my hand any time you like, right?”

A longer pause. “Is it okay?”

“Yes.”

“…I’m holding you to it,” Sora says, and squeezes back. Something squirms pleasantly in Nath’s stomach. Her cheeks feel warm, so maybe she’s blushing. But it’s a warm day to start with, so maybe not. Best not to think about it. She finally rolls her coin into the slot of the vending machine, and there is a satisfying clunk as it hits. “Oh, Nath. Also.”

“Mm?”

“You were staring a whole lot in the gym.”

After mere seconds of feeling happy and relaxed, Nath suddenly feels sweat breaking out on her forehead again.

“I don’t mind,” Sora continues, “but you should be careful. You’ll make Sham jealous.”

“Because I was staring at you?”

“Because you _weren’t_ staring at her.”

“…Right. Noted,” Nath replies. If that’s what it takes to make Sham jealous, she worries how jealous she’ll be when they walk back into the gym holding hands (and, in her case, blushing. Or not blushing. It’s Schroedinger's blush, which both exists and doesn’t exist until she observes it).

But even if she’s blushing like a proverbial maiden, Nath has been around for a while. She might not have all the answers, but she knows which questions to ask. So when they get back to the gym, she keeps staring – at Sora’s face, this time, rather than any of the more exotic body parts on offer. More specifically, at her eyes, and where they were pointing. Mostly – almost exclusively, in fact – they’re glued to Nath’s thighs.

She had wondered how Sora figured out she’d been staring. It turns out she wasn’t the only one.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The style of this one may be a bit janky, because I wasn't originally intending to post it -- it was a just-for-me story. But then I accidentally put development in there, and also the Sora & Sham cuties pack came out and I wanted to make a story for that, so I ended up hurrying this one.


	46. Blackberries (Nath Day Story)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wrote this for Nath day, but finished a couple days late. It is pure, unfiltered indulgence, and not canon to the rest of the series. Warning: implied nudity and adult happenings.

They are roaming today, by land and by sky, gambolling through a world that has grown lush and beautiful in their absence. Ears of barley bristle in the fields they pass; groves of apple trees hang heavy with fruit softly ripening in the summer sun. But the finest bounty is to be found in the forest, and it is there they alight, to lose themselves in the shadows of the trees and the rich scents of the woods.

This place, Sora says, is her favourite, and she greets the landscape warmly like an old friend. On this stump she once saw a red squirrel, collecting acorns from the great oaks; over here there is a beehive, thrumming with activity, and a little further ahead she found the husk of an old log cabin. Under the forest canopy, her hair is the colour of honey and her eyes are ivy green, her easy stride the echo of the hunters of old. She is not of this place, but it has touched her, and the ever-watchful trees give way to a girl with bones older than their own.

Next to her, Nath feels like a large, lumbering thing. She has seen this forest a thousand times from the sky, and never once ventured inside; a virgin and untouched corner of the world is opening up before her. She is warm, but not uncomfortably so. A cool breeze whispers against the nape of her neck, where the collar of her summer dress does not reach, and somewhere ahead of them she hears the sound of a brook snaking its way through the undergrowth; even just the sound brings to mind the taste of clear water, cold enough to numb the lips.

Under her arm is looped a wicker basket, the handle coarse against her artificial skin. They’ll pick berries, Sora has promised, and make a pie of them. Nath wonders. To her it seems like a fantasy, a well-intentioned plan that cannot come to pass. If Sora finds berries, she’ll eat them. That’s the kind of person she is: somebody unafraid to try new things, to love them or to hate them. Nath has seen the world. She has walked deserts, climbed mountains, crossed oceans. But she was always too tired, too jaded, to open herself. She never wondered at the things she saw and felt, the way that Sora does. There is something beautiful in that openness, that willingness to embrace the world and its people even after seeing them at their worst. She loves that about Sora. She thinks she always has.

As they walk together they speak quietly about this and that. There is nobody to hear them, and no-one to disturb, but they keep their voices low by unspoken agreement. They don’t need to speak loudly because they are close, enough to bump shoulders every so often as they thread their way through the undergrowth.

As they pass away from Sora’s favourite haunts and into parts of the forest unknown, the talk goes from treasured memories to little exclamations of wonder at new sights, new sounds. They see stands of mushrooms and Sora asks if they are truffles; they’re not, Nath confirms, but they’re edible and a local delicacy, so they scoop a few into the basket to try later, fried with butter and garlic and breadcrumbs. The mossy ground underfoot gives way to tall grass as they advance and the canopy of leaves above them begins to thin; here and there are spots of sunlight poking down through the gaps in the trees, and as they walk they wind their path to pass through each one in turn, as if it were good luck.

Soon the canopy breaks entirely, and Nath knows it is here that their adventure will end. There is a toppled log, hollow but not yet rotten, big enough for three or four to sit on. A little way to the right of it, the long grass wanes and bulrushes tower over the edge of a small pond. Most importantly, there is a brace of hardy bushes, speckled with dark berries that glisten in the sunlight. They’ll go no further today, now that they’ve found this place; they’re unlikely to find an equal to it.

She smiles wryly as Sora begins to survey her new territory. She ignores the berries for now, and instead ambles over to inspect the pond; the water seems clean enough, and not stagnant. Next she tests the strength of the log, pushing down on it with both arms and then peering into the dark hollow inside. She wonders aloud if there are any frogs. She’d like there to be frogs, she says.

Nath agrees, but focuses her attention on the blackberry bushes, wondering if she’ll be able to pick them with her clumsy prosthetics. If she uses too much force, she’ll just crush the berries between her fingers. Even then, she can see dark thorns hidden behind the lush green leaves. If she pricks herself she will not bleed, but she’s loathe to damage the artificial skin that covers her hands. It’s a problem she doesn’t know she has the delicacy to solve.

But still, she reaches for them. She feels the thorns scrape against her knuckles and dig into the skin as she gingerly, almost tenderly, snaps a berry from the berry from the stem. She holds it up to the light and examines it: no discolouration, no mottling. Acceptable.

“Sora,” she calls softly. “Aaaahn.”

Obligingly, Sora trots over and opens her mouth. Nath smiles. Usually, this would be in reverse: Sora, with her healthy arms, feeding Nath. But it’s important, she thinks, that they’re prepared to do it the other way around as well. It’s fairer. More equal.

“Good?” she asks.

“Mmm.”

Together, they settle down to pick the berries, sampling as they go. Sora is faster, braver, more dextrous. Her hands soon find a rhythm: find, pick, deposit, repeat. She only interrupts it to toss the occasional berry into her mouth. Nath’s hands are clumsy and cumbersome, but they remember – however briefly – the feeling of her fingertips brushing against Sora’s lips. The berries she tries are delicious, sweet with only a hint of tartness.

They fill half the basket and stop, leaving enough berries on the bushes to feed other hungry visitors to this quiet place. The has climbed high in the sky; what was once a relaxed heat is growing fiercer. She leans back against the hollowed log, flattening the grass beneath her like a nesting cat, and lets the sun warm her bones while it’s still enjoyable. Sora sits down next to her, resting her shaggy head on Nath’s collar, where the metal recedes. She closes her eyes as she basks; she is soft, heavy, warm.

Minutes pass. The sounds of the forest envelop them.

One of Sora’s eyes flickers open. She tilts her face upwards to look at Nath’s, and her expression is so many things – tender, childish, wanting, all rolled up into one.

“You stained your lips,” she says, in her soft, dreamy voice.

Nath breathes deeply. The world contracts. “So have you.”

She’s not sure which one of them moves first – her, or Sora. But when they do, it is as though they’re being drawn together by something irresistible, like magnetism or gravity. The distance between their faces shortens, and then disappears; their lips clumsily brush against each other, and again, and then finally they are kissing, and Sora is filling up her senses, filling up her mind and her heart until there is no space for anything else. She feels elated, almost dizzy, and behind everything there is the taste of blackberries, the colour of honey, the warmth of Sora’s body pressing against hers. It feels easy, natural. Sublime.

When they part she is blushing furiously, breathing heavily. Her body feels somehow lighter, younger, than it did before. But most of all, there is a sense of freedom. She has loved Sora for a while, but now she is _allowed_ to love her, openly and whole-heartedly. It’s not a problem she has to figure out the answer for. It’s not a weight to carry around inside her chest. It has become something greater, not just something she feels but something she does. She doesn’t know what to say, so she says “Wow.”

“Wow,” Sora agrees. Her smile has a note of triumph in it, like a runner finally completing a marathon and accepting their prize.

“Are we dating now?” she asks. Her mind is in a daze.

“We’ve been dating for a while,” is Sora’s serious reply. “Today was a date.”

“Was it?”

“We went somewhere, we ate together, and we kissed. That’s a date. Definitely.”

She smiles, and as if by prior agreement, they go back to kissing. Gradually, their positions change. Her hands naturally find themselves drifting, one to Sora’s waist and the other to stroke her hair. Sora gradually trusts her with more and more of her weight, always pressing closer, until, she is all but lying down in the long grass with Sora on top of her, her face so close it takes up all Nath’s vision. All she can see is the woman she loves.

“I’m going to get grass stains all over my dress,” she murmurs. The last little dregs of her grumpy facade, escaping into the forest. Sora makes no move to let her up, and Nath makes no move to unseat her. It’s not an option for either of them.

“If you’re worried, take it off.”

Nath smiles ruefully. “I’m not wearing anything underneath, though.”

“I don’t mind.” As always, Sora’s gift for understatement is astounding. Her smile becomes just a touch mischievous, and she gives Nath’s dress a playful tug, as if expecting to be scolded.

Nath breathes in, out. Her body feels warm.

“Well,” she says wryly, “we’ve been dating for a while,” and lifts her arms.

As the fabric slides across her bare skin, she wonders why they never did this before. It feels so natural. So comfortable. Meant to be. The boundary between friends and lovers, blurring so far that it ceased to exist. Maybe Sham was right. Maybe they always _were_ an accident waiting to happen, a ‘when’ and not an ‘if’. As Sora looks down at her, her eyes half-lidded and her cheeks flushed, Nath reaches up to cup her cheek.

“Sora”, she says, in a whisper that feels so loud the entire world can hear it. “I love you.”

The sun is shining; a world once destroyed is thriving around them. After so many years of waiting, she has found the happy ending that was set aside for her.

She is happy, and complete. Here and now, in the blackberry grove, her heart, at last, is opened.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aaaaahhh I love these two dorks. I just wanted to make a story where Nath was happy. This isn't necessarily the quote-unquote 'payoff' I'm aiming for with these two characters, but if I never get around to that, maybe this can be a prototype, alternate timeline epilogue for them.
> 
> Also, if it feels abrupt, it's worth mentioning that I put easily 60-70k words into characterising these idiots already, and I was blatantly teasing them most of the way. If I want to to write a one-off story where they smooch, then that's what I'm going to do, dang it!


	47. Ultimate Weapon Girls (I)

Buttercream icing was the devil. Sham had thought about it, and she couldn’t draw any other conclusion: it had been put on the earth to tempt poor, fallible mortals like her towards sin with its deliciousness. It did a very good job of it. Sham was as fond of cupcakes as the next person – maybe a little moreso, because cupcakes were the cutest known generic cake form – but if you happened to lace one with buttercream she would spare no effort in tracking it down and putting it inside her body.

She had even deigned to eat Hime’s buttercream icing cupcakes, which, admittedly, looked a bit more like a coalition of miniature sludge monsters arranged on a platter. Baking was not Hime’s forte. She hadn’t been allowed to when she was on the spaceship; baking was Saki’s character trait (some would say her _only_ character trait) and she got very protective over it. Moreover, baking was rather less forgiving of the ‘throw stuff in for the hell of it’ method of cooking that Hime had devoted herself to. Sora, who doggedly followed the instructions and weighed everything out three times, had achieved rather more attractive results from the same recipe. This had been a mild source of conflict in their household, until Hime considered that perhaps there were simply two kinds of people: those who produced cupcakes, and those for whom cupcakes were produced. All things considered, there was definitely an attraction to being in column B.

But even the most misshaped, sunken cupcakes could be rendered irresistible with the addition of buttercream, and in very short order Sham had demolished the majority of Hime’s ill-fated platter, much to her host’s delight. This, Sham reflected, was one of life’s little joys she had forsaken when she became a touring idol: hanging around her friend’s homes, eating their food, and being adored for it. It felt good. Better than good, even. Fantastic.

On the other side of the dining table, Hime smiled sweetly. She _did_ enjoy people who were enthusiastic about their food. It always felt so very nostalgic, and reminded her of living with Iru, for whom food was a blessing and table manners were optional. Suguri and Sora appreciated her cooking, of course – in their own quiet little ways – but there really was nothing like having a good guzzler at the table.

“So,” Sham said, when the platter had been demolished and the only thing left to do was lick icing off her fingertips, “you said you wanna talk about something?”

Hime leaned over the table conspiratorially, resting her head on her hands. “Oh, yes. Nothing serious, of course. Just a little enquiry. Now, I trust you know that my dear Suguri is rather a big fan of yours?”

“Well… I knew she was _a_ fan, but I don’t really know how _big_ of a fan. Mostly she seems super down-to-earth, you know? And she gave me some great advice one time. I think _I_ could be a fan of _her_ , hahaha.”

Hime didn’t respond. She didn’t think she needed to. Of _course_ Sham was a fan of Suguri’s. Everybody ought to be, in her very biased opinion. But she took it as a compliment on her own good taste in women, and, after a moment of thought, rewarded it with a genuine smile. “Well, she’s a large enough fan to have acquired some of your merchandise. A shirt, I believe, which you might have seen Sora wearing from time to time.”

She might have seen Sora wearing it from the next town over, to be honest. It was a shade that Suguri might have described as ‘bold’ and Hime might have described as ‘appalling’. Sora described it as ‘pink’, although it bore remembering that she had a rare gift for understatement. It definitely _existed_ , and served as a reminder that mankind was capable of making just about _anything_ into a weapon if left unsupervised.

“Oh yeah! That was hers, huh? I wondered how Sora had managed to get such an old shirt. Does you want me to autograph it for her?”

If she was honest, the only thing Hime wanted _anybody_ to do with that shirt was incinerate it. But that was the kind of thing that was probably better left unsaid, at least until she figured out how to get away with it.

“Well, no,” she said, keeping her face carefully neutral. “Actually, I was wondering if you would perhaps consider doing a private concert for her. Nothing flashy, of course, just a song or two. It would mean so much to her, you know. She’s been listening to your music in some form or another for, oh, _thousands_ of years.”

Hime had anticipated a wave of noise in response to this. Sham as a person was full of sounds, all of them magical, and most of them requiring a doctorate in Shamonomics to decipher. When none of them came within two seconds, she looked up and found that the idol’s face had – apparently with great difficulty – crumpled into a worried frown.

“I… I don’t _know_. I mean, if anybody deserves a private concert, it’s you guys, right? You’ve done so much for me. You reunited me with Sora, you invited me into your life and your home, you gave me cupcakes… I super appreciate it, you know? You and Suguri are amazing. But… I’m _meant_ to be on hiatus, making an album for everybody to enjoy. It feels like I’d be betraying my fans if I started doing shows behind their back. Is it for, like, a special occasion or anything?”

Hime paused. “Not as such. I just thought it would be a nice, romantic gesture to arrange a treat for her. You don’t need a special occasion for romance, do you?”

“Ahhhhhhh! That’s such a good sentiment, too…I don’t know what to do!” Sham moaned, and looked to the stars for guidance. The stars weren’t out at the time, so instead she got guidance from the support beams of Suguri’s kitchen roof. _Apply wood treatment_ , they said. _Check for signs of damp_.

“Well, I’m not asking you to give a go-ahead right now, of course. I’m just asking what might make you consider it. I know money is probably no good to you, but I’m sure there’s something else I can do to compensate your time.”

“I… I mean, you guys are already my friends, so that’s more than good enough for me. I don’t even know what I’d ask for.”

“Well, I could put in a word with Sora, for example.”

Sham remained quiet for a few seconds. But when those seconds were over, her expression was more… cunning. A businesswoman. “Oh? Like what?”

“Well, it depends what you wanted, really,” Hime said, with a sparkling smile. “I don’t mean to brag, but I’m quite persuasive. I could probably nudge her into doing quite a lot of things, _although-” –_ and her face became much sterner – “-I certainly wouldn’t allow that power to be abused for anything too… overt.”

Sham considered this. At least, she appeared to consider it. Deep down, she had already made her decision, and was just trying not to appear too eager. “All right. All right! I’ll do it! But on one condition!”

“Oh? How lovely! And what would your condition be?” Hime asked, her smile widening. It was probably, she thought, something quite simple, like setting up a day out or getting Sorta to wear some outlandish outfit. A very painless price to pay, for the sheer amount of brownie points it would earn her with Suguri.

Sham crossed her arms, and looked Hime in the eye like a general about to give a rousing declaration. “I want Sora to perform with me.”

Hime blinked. “…perform with you? As a comedy duo, perhaps?”

“No!” Sham slammed her fists on the table, which mostly did nothing. Suguri’s table, like her door, was old and venerable and could support the weight of three normal humans (or one Nath). It barely shuddered from the unprovoked assault. “As an idol! I’ll teach her the song and the dance routine and everything, and we’ll perform for Suguri together! It’ll be the best! The best!”

Hime picked her next words very carefully. “Aha… well… you know, Sham, I’m not sure that’s _entirely_ realistic. Sora can do anything she puts her mind to, of course, and we both know that, but I think her talents are distributed in… well, the exact opposite direction, you know? She’s an expert at being quiet and not moving much. The world’s foremost expert, I would go so far as to say. But I’m not sure she’d take quite so well to singing and dancing.”

“I can teach her. I’ve been an idol for thousands of years, and I can totally make her into a superstar! It’d be so _amazing,_ to be able to share the thing I’m most passionate about with the person I care about the most!” She leaned across the table and seized Hime’s hands. “Hime, we’ve _got_ to make this happen!”

Sham’ expression was earnest, and guileless. Painfully so. There was no ulterior motive, no knowledge that was being withheld. Just the genuine excitement of a girl discovering a dream that had been buried, and finding that it was within reach. Hime realised in that moment that the situation was no longer in her control. She couldn’t say ‘no’ to that face, even if she really, really wanted to.

“Well… ah. It might be a bit of a tall order,” she said, sealing her own fate. “But I’ll see what I can do.”

* * *

 

The first step towards a singing, dancing Sora was to catch her in a good mood, which was easier said than done. It wasn’t, of course, that Sora didn’t have good moods. Hime was fairly sure she had the same emotional range as everybody else, including such top-ten hits as happy, sad, and that weird kind of angry you got when you were hungry, She just didn’t broadcast them. There was only one cast-iron law when it came to her emotions, and it was that Sora never got up on the wrong side of bed (or the beanbag, in her case). If she felt grumpy when she woke up, she went back to sleep – and would repeat the cycle until her excess grump had dissipated, or until somebody unwisely decided to prod a sleeping bear.

Still, there were ways to cheat the system. The best time to catch her, Hime had decided, was right after she fed the ducks. She loved her ducks unconditionally, and they loved her back. Together they formed a beautiful cocoon of affection and feathers that was difficult to observe without feeling warm and tingly in the chest. Was it worth the spilled bird seed, the feathers that got everywhere, and the cacophony of quacking when the troupe of birds followed her back into the house? The jury (consisting of Hime, Hime, and also Hime) was out. But it was definitely convenient for this exact situation, and she wasn’t above taking advantage of it.

She waited until Sora wandered into the kitchen, still wearing a blissful post-duck smile, to launch an assault the only way she knew how: with ice cream. Boldly, she cracked the seal on a brand-new tub of rocky road, wafting the smell of chocolate and nuts through the kitchen. Sora, who had been about to fashion herself a sandwich, stopped in her tracks.

“Sora, why don’t you sit down and have some ice cream with me? I have something I want to ask you about,” Hime called.

“Mm.” Sora took the bar stool and sat, although she almost immediately began to fidget. It was a habit she’d fallen into recently – probably learned from Sham, who usually stood up and walked around when she ate. Her gaze shifted to the ice cream. “You’ve finally come to the light side.”

“Oh, I’m not giving up on strawberry being the best flavour. But,” Hime said grandly, “I think there’s some room for reconciliation. Here, I’ll give you a big serving. Don’t tell Suguri.”

Sora thought about this for a second. It sounded almost as if she were being offered a deal with the devil: an exchange of silence for ice cream. It seemed like a good proposition, though. Sora had silence in abundance. She produced it in massive quantities. Besides, Hime did not seem like a very threatening devil, if she was honest. Buttercream icing was more devilish than her. She nodded, and took up her spoon.

“So,” Hime said, after a cursory period of mutual ice-cream appreciation had passed. “I have a request for you from Sham.”

Sora’s eyes narrowed; her spoon paused midway to her mouth. “…Suspicious.”

“W-wait, you’re suspicious already?”

“Mm. If Sham wanted me to do something, she’d ask me herself – even if it was embarrassing. She’s good at asking embarrassing questions.” She paused. “And you bribed me with ice-cream, so it’s definitely not something I want to do.”

These were both very good points, but they were inconvenient and Hime didn’t like them. Even softened up by her ducks and plied with ice-cream, Sora was a formidable foe. “W-well. I agreed to ask you, you see, because… well, it was kind of an exchange of goods and services…”

“So she wanted you to talk me into something,” she said, flatly. “Extra, extra suspicious. Wait here. I’m going to go call her.”

Hime, very quietly, began to panic. The situation was beginning to escape her control. “Sora, wait. If she asks you herself, there’s no reason for her to do the favour I asked for. Just hear me out, okay?”

“So you’re just being a middle man. I’m disappointed,” Sora said sternly. “I didn’t raise my sister to act like this.”

Hime fought the urge to scream. It wasn’t supposed to be this difficult, she thought, for her to ask a favour from a member of family on behalf of that member of family’s best friend. The economy of interpersonal gratitude was breaking. Bereft of any solution, Hime took a very big spoon of ice cream and pouted.

“…Hime. It’s okay. I was teasing you. It was very funny,” Sora said, with the same seriousness as everything else she said. Sora told jokes with the same gravity other people reserved for military invasions.

“Oh, _yes_! Obviously! Because it’s _so_ obvious when you’re _joking_ , as opposed to when you’re rambling on about nonsense. Silly me.”

“Mm… I’m bad at jokes. But the only way to get better is to joke more. It’s a conundrum.”

_This is what she thinks about all day_ , Hime realised. _Ducks, ice cream, and how to be better at jokes. The strongest weapon in the world, and that’s what goes through her head._

“What did Sham want? If it’s not weird, I’ll do it,” Sora declared. She did not declare what she would consider ‘weird’, which would have been very valuable information to know, but that was fine. An opportunity had been presented, and Hime was all about seizing opportunities.

Very quickly, she outlined the conversation she’d had with Sham, and watched with dismay as Sora’s expression gradually changed from ‘blank but reasonable’ to ‘the slight frown of infinite stubbornness’.

“…Sorry. I can’t,” Sora said, shaking her head. “I think… I could dance. Maybe. But singing is too much. Even dancing… might be too much. I’d ruin things.”

“Why? I’ve not really seen you try either before. You might turn out to be a natural. You never know.”

“But not… the way Sham is. When she does her idol routines, she’s so… energetic. And cheerful. You feel like you’re flying, just watching her. I don’t know if I can be that way.”

Hime smiled wryly. True, Sora wasn’t exactly what she would call energetic. And feeling like you were flying wasn’t exactly remarkable for their social group, either. She had a point. But the way she spoke about the idol routines gave her a little bit of hope. “Sham thinks you can. Definitely.”

“Sham thinks I can do anything.”

“ _You_ think _Nath_ can do anything.”

“...Muuu.”

Hime began to toy with a loose curl of hair. “Why don’t you just give it a try, Sora? Even if you don’t like it, and you have to quit later, it’ll still be something for you and Sham to do together.”

“But if I quit, Suguri won’t get an idol show. So there’ll be no point.”

Hime sighed, and stretched. “Sora… I wish I could show you, you know. When Sham came up with the idea, her face was just… so excited. More excited than I was, definitely, and more excited than I think Suguri would be. For us, an idol show isn’t something we really need… it would be a nice date, and that’s all. But for Sham, it’s a part of her life that she can’t share with you any other way. It’s… very important to her, I think.” She paused a moment. Gave the words time to sink in, to find purchase in Sora’s strange and mysterious mind. “So, even if you don’t end up putting on a show, I think you should try.”

Sora didn’t say anything. The silence stretched on, and on, and on; the ice cream in her bowl began to melt. The gears in her head were turning; whatever her decision might be, the process of making it had begun. In other words, Hime thought, her job was over. She’d done all she could.

“Well, then,” she said, standing up. “I’ll let you get on with things. Whatever you decide, make sure to talk with Sham about it.”

Sora nodded, but didn’t reply. Hime, having discharged her Sora-related duties for the day, began to think about the other things she needed to do. She needed to wake Suguri, and harass her until she took a shower; breakfast had to be alchemised from the base elements of bread, bacon and eggs; the great backlog of ’videos with cats in them’ that existed on the internet had to be whittled down. They were all very enjoyable tasks, and she hastened to attend to them.

When she returned, with a freshly-hugged and washed Suguri in tow, she was no closer to knowing Sora’s decision than before. But she did notice that a full tub of rocky road ice cream had quietly evaporated, never to return.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been really enjoying the Cuties pack, and Sora's version of UWG is so cute... I had to make some stories about it. Been buffeted a bit by life events so writing is more difficult at the moment, but hopefully quality doesn't go down too much.


	48. Ultimate Weapon Girls, Part II

Nath sighed. Nath did a lot of sighing. She had a lot of them, all stored up inside her after thousands of years of exasperation, and she was trying to let them out at a rate that wouldn’t crash the world sigh economy. That much was common knowledge. But not many knew that Nath, as a meticulous collector of the strange and trivial, had selected sighs of an incredible variety. She had one for every occasion: a ‘well done’ kind of sigh, a ‘you woke me up at 4am and I’m grumpy’ kind of sigh, and even the rare and valuable ‘now that, right there, is an _extremely_ attractive bottom’ kind of sigh. She had them all.

Today she was sighing because she had been struck down with a most disagreeable malady: bed envy. It wasn’t that she didn’t _like_ her bed, of course. She had assembled it herself after adopting it from the flatpack furniture shelter, and it had served her well over the years, needing only a few minor reinforcements to deal with her weight.

But, well, it was a little _small_ , wasn’t it? It could only really admit one Nath and one cat. Compared to Suguri and Hime’s spacious double bed, it seemed miserable in comparison. And that was before you factored in Sham’s bed, which she had recently installed into her apartment and which was less a bed than a small room with a mattress for the floor. Nath had to remind herself gently that, contrary to popular opinion, size wasn’t everything in the bedroom. (If it was, Sora would have been the uncontested winner, because she would sleep anywhere. Therefore, her bed was the entire world, and the whole world was in fact in bed with her.)

Of course, Nath’s sudden desire for more spacious sleeping accommodations was purely on the grounds of comfort, and _not_ – as a treacherous little voice in the back of her mind might suggest – because it would make it easier to perform, oh, any number of interesting night-time activities, with any number of ten-thousand year old women she might find herself physically and romantically attracted to.

Still, raging bed envy aside, it was a good morning. She had woken up, sipped a coffee, and was currently enjoying the atmosphere. There had been a thunderstorm overnight, which had broken up the muggy summer heat and made the air feel fresh and clean again. As she nibbled a corner of toast and stroked the cat, she felt well-prepared for an eventful and productive day – and her first task was a very important phone call.

“ _Hello,”_ Sora’s voice intoned dully after a few rings. _“We don’t want any.”_

“Oh. That’s a shame. Roger had kittens, but I guess I’ll have to give them away to somebody else.”

“ _Oh, it’s Nath… Muu. We might want some. Just a few. How cute are their meows?”_

“I was joking. I think Roger’s neutered, anyway.” She paused, and cleared her throat. “So… How were you last night?”

“ _Last night?”_

“There was a thunderstorm. I tried calling, but I couldn’t get reception. Were you alright?”

“ _Oh. Sorry. I didn’t know. I must have slept through it. I was tired.”_

“Ah… Still, that’s a good thing.”

“ _Were you worried?_ ”

“I wouldn’t say I was _worried,_ necessarily – I know you can handle it. But I just wanted to check you were okay.” She took a long sip of her coffee, and scratched the cat’s ears. “So, you slept the whole night… Did you have any interesting dreams?”

“ _Dreams?”_

“Mm.”

“ _I don’t remember. Did you?”_

“I think… maybe I did. I remember us being in a forest.”

“ _I was in it?”_

“Mm.”  
_“What about Suguri and Hime?”_

“No.”

“ _Or Sham?”_

“Just us.”

“… _was it a good dream?”_

“I woke up in a good mood, so I think it was.” She let it sit in the air for a moment. Was it strange to talk about dreams? Maybe it was. It had come out of nowhere. Normally, she didn’t remember any of her dreams, and she didn’t take notice of the ones she did. But as soon as she’d thought about it, she realised she wanted to share it, and that Sora was the right person to share it with. Maybe that feeling – that desire for openness, for communication – was all that mattered. Or maybe she didn’t need to justify her actions to herself. “Anyway… Our comics should be coming in at the store today. Do you want to come out and grab them with me?”

“ _Muu… I can’t. I’m doing secret idol training with Sham today.”_

“I see… It doesn’t seem very secret if you tell me.”

“ _It’s not a secret from you. It’s a secret from Suguri. You can’t tell her, on pain of death.”_

“You wouldn’t kill me. The cat would never forgive you.”

“ _That’s true. Okay. On pain of tickling, then.”_

“In that case, my lips are sealed.” Nath smiled as she said it. What a strange, laid-back conversation they were having. “How’s it going so far?”

“ _...nn. It’s troublesome. We’re meant to be performing at the end of the week, but… being an idol is hard. I’m bad at singing. Sham keeps saying I need to sing louder, but… it’s tough to raise your voice. Doesn’t it feel like you’re breaking the rules?”_

Nath made vague noises of agreement. In reality, she thought Sora worrying about rules was a strange paradox. Yes, she did seem to prefer law and order when she could get it, but… wasn’t this also the same girl who went down in history as an anarchist hero who spent half her time fighting the military she defected from? She was pretty sure defecting was also against the rules, although in retrospect it had worked out splendidly for almost everybody involved.

“ _And she keeps saying I need to put more feeling into my dances. I don’t get it. **How** do I put more feeling in? It’s really vague.”_

“You sound like you’re having fun, though.”

“ _Mm. I am having fun. Sham’s amazing. She’s got so much energy. But I’m worried that Suguri’s show won’t go well, and it’ll be my fault._ ”

“Well… Sham’s amazing, right? She should be able to teach you in time. Just try your best, and let her worry about the details.”

“ _Mm… You’re right. Secretly, she’s super reliable.”_

‘Secretly’, in Nath’s opinion, was about right. Of course, she was a professional. She had timetables to keep, performances to do, and a fanbase to cultivate. You didn’t do all that without having a certain level of responsibility. But she had a talent for appearing flaky, or scatterbrained. Innocuous, that was the word.

The conversation went on for a few more minutes before Nath heard Sham’s voice somewhere in the background, which was Sora’s cue to go. She seemed at least a little less worried than she was before, although it was hard to tell. Nath, haver of innumerable sighs, deployed one of her special ‘job well done’ sighs, and finished her coffee. She wondered if she should have asked about Sham’s bed, before deciding she didn’t want to know. Knowing would validate her jealousy.

Five minutes later, the phone rang again. She scooped it up with the hand that was not occupied by cat. “Hello?”

“ _Nath, I forgot something important.”_

“What?”

“ _What are you wearing?”_

“Socks,” she answered, and hung up.

* * *

 

A ‘crash course’.

It wasn’t the most flattering thing to call Sham’s tuition, but it was the most fitting. She had to strike while the iron was hot, while the fire in her heart was still burning at full strength; only then could she forge Sora into an idol. That was what she thought, and why she’d set the date of the performance so soon. They were soldiers, in another life; they came alive at the last second, at the moment of crisis. All she had to do was reach into herself, find the very basics – the absolute bare minimums of her ten thousand year career – and compress them down into something Sora could take in within a week. It was that kind of tuition.

There had also, admittedly, been a bit of crashing.

She put her hands on Sora’s waist, where lately they had become more and more comfortable, and quietly walked her though the steps to the lift again. Lifts weren’t exactly a standard part of idol choreography, for good reason; as impressive as they were, they took a level of core strength that not every idol had, and usually required a break from singing. But singing was by far the part Sora was least confident at, and she had athleticism to spare. It played exactly to her strengths, and the more they tailored the performance to what she was already good at, the quicker it would be to polish it.

Of course, there were bound to be a few tumbles along the way. But slowly, diligently, they were pushing through the difficult first steps and into a lift that was, if not elegant, then at least functional. The weak point was turning out to be Sham herself, who hadn’t lifted anything heavier than a guitar for a very long time. Her arms trembled, her forehead beaded with sweat, and she was happy, happy, _happy_ that even after ten thousand years of practice, she still wasn’t perfect – that they could fall down together and laugh about it, after all this time.

“Huwaaaaaaa! Okay, okay! That’s enough for today!” she said, after one last attempt. “Ooh… This is such a workout. I’m going to have huge biceps after this!”

She wondered, sometimes, if Sora had ever seen actually seen a bicep. Suguri and Hime seemed to live a bicep-free existence, and Nath _definitely_ didn’t have any biceps to show off. Skinny arms seemed to be the trend nowadays. Well, Sham, thought, let them have their skinny arms. She, the pure hearted idol, would embrace the world of muscle and demonstrate the beauty of well-toned biceps for her best friend!

“Sham,” Sora said, and poked her in the chubbiest part of her cheek. “You’re thinking about weird things again.”

After taking a moment to rewind the tape in her head, Sham found she couldn’t argue. So instead, she flopped down on the bed and rolled around a bit before changing the topic. (In lieu of crash mats, they had been using the mattress to soften the impacts of lifts gone wrong. The springs were already beginning to suffer a little. “It’s fine, it’s fine! I was thinking about _strategy_. _”_

Sham thought a lot about strategy. In addition to her inclusion of lifts, she had also tailored the stage outfits for maximum effect. Step one had been picking long-ish skirts that swooshed and had ruffles – and the more swooshing and the more ruffles, the better. Nowadays, the trend was for shorter, less ornate skirts, but Sham knew her audience, and she thought Suguri’s tastes would be more classical. Besides, the movement of the skirt would attract the eye away from Sora’s footwork, which was still a bit stiff.

Step two was to make sure they had ribbons around their necks – big ones. If Sham knew anything about anything, it was that Sora and everybody she knew was absolutely obsessed with oversized neck ornaments. In fact, she had half a suspicion that if you _removed_ their neck ornaments, they would poof out of existence, like a genie that had granted its last wish.

“Will it really be fine?” Sora asked, flopping down beside her. “I still can’t do the song very well. And I keep getting my feet crossed. I’m… not good at being an idol.”

“It’s fine, okay? You’re making great progress. When _I_ first became an idol, I was way worse than you are right now.”

Sora shifted slightly, to assume a more sluglike position. “Really? But… I got the feeling you were always good at singing and dancing. Even in the war.”

“I was, but…” Sham looked away. “Well… I don’t know. It’s a long story. Kinda heavy, too. I don’t know if it’s a good idea to go into it.”

If she was expecting an understanding response, she didn’t get it. Instead, Sora gave her a gentle push so she rolled over onto her belly, and then use her back as a pillow. This, in their world, was feminine bonding. Sleep was an important part of social interaction, even moreso if you did it on top of other people.

“I’m kinda heavy. But you can lift me,” Sora said, when she had wiggled enough to make herself comfortable. “And I want to hear stories about that kind of thing. Maybe it’ll make me better at idoling.”

“You really aren’t that heavy… but that’s beside the point! I don’t really think it’s a story that will help you be an idol. It’s not really worth listening to.”

“Then it’s a Sham story. Sham stories are always worth listening to.”

Sham sighed. She had begun to learn a lesson that Nath learned long ago: once Sora set her heart on something, it was very difficult to persuade her to let it go. Instead, she spent a few seconds considering – reluctantly – where to start.

“Well… when I first started being an idol, it was a few decades after the War. It took us that long to get back on our feet, you know? Before that, everybody was just trying to survive. There was no food left, and the earth was almost uninhabitable because of the war. People were saying it was the Apocalypse. Both our side and the other side were basically wiped out. There was barely anybody left. It took us a while to figure out that we’d even been _saved_ from something, and that the entire world could have died.”

She tried to make her voice soothing, and calm. It was ancient history. There was no need to be upset about it now, no matter how bad it was at the time. Sora said nothing, but Sham could tell she was listening attentively, even without seeing her face.

“A lot of people… well, they just didn’t have the willpower to survive in a world like that. They either fell into despair and stopped fending for themselves, or…” Despite herself, a nervous giggle bubbled up from her throat. “Well. Anyway, we needed everybody we could get, or we’d never pull through. So I figured that, since I could sing a bit and dance a bit, I might be able to cheer people up. They needed that, I think. A bit of entertainment. A bit of cheer.

“So I started going around to all the different places where people had begun to settle, and I’d help them out with labour during the day, and then sing and dance for them at night. But no matter how well I sang or danced, or how cute I tried to be, I could barely cheer anybody up at all. Sora, do you know why that is?”

The question hung in the air for ten seconds or more. For a moment, Sham thought her friend had genuinely gone to sleep.

“Nn. Why was it?”

“It’s because an idol isn’t just somebody who sings and dances. It’s not even somebody who’s cute. An idol is somebody who _uses_ those talents to try and heal the wounds in other people’s hearts. Whether that’s just letting them escape from daily life for a while, or reaching out with their lyrics, or even just having a ball and dancing up a storm with a big smile, an idol’s mission is to make people happy and ease their pain!”

“Is cuteness a talent, though?”

“Definitely! Super definitely! But… back then, I didn’t really get it. It’s difficult to heal another person’s heart when you’ve still got wounds in your _own_ heart… it’s a bit like telling somebody not to cry when you’re in tears yourself. I wasn’t really doing too hot back then, you know? I didn’t really… have anything. A place in the world, a family, a future… it all got wiped clean, the day the war ended.” She paused. Her throat was getting a little tight. “Oh, but don’t get me wrong. I got all those things back again, in the end. And the things I got were much, much better than the ones I traded away. After everything, it was a _good_ thing. But it was rough for a while.”

Sora rolled over, and then pulled herself forward until she was lying on her belly across Sham’s back – as if they were a human cross. Her weight, Sham thought, was a little comforting. Definitely more comforting than when they were doing the lifts, that was for sure. “So you figured that out, and then you were a great idol?”

“Well, sorta. Actually, there’s _another_ part to being an idol, and I figured that bit out first,” Sham replied. “On top of all that stuff earlier, idols are role models. For better or for worse, people are gonna look up to you, and reflect some of your values in themselves. So, you have to be the kind of person you want other people to be. The kind of person you want to see more of in the world. When I figured that out, it all fell into place.”

“What kind of person did you choose?” Sora asked. “I’d want more people like Suguri. Or Nath. Hime… I think one Hime might be enough.”

“The kind of people I wanted to see most of all were… well, happy people. So I tried to make myself into that kind of person first. I practised my cheerfulness every day, and I smiled until people couldn’t help but smile back, even when things were bad. I laughed every day. And when I cried, I tried to think of it as sadness leaving my body, so I could fit more happiness inside myself. And, after a while, I became a _real_ idol. So, Sora!” she said, her voice suddenly sharp and clear. “Don’t worry if you can’t sing or dance too well. You’re super cute, which is step one! You want to make other people feel better, which is step two! Step three is to go out and have a bunch of fun, so that Suguri and Hime follow in your footsteps and have a bunch of fun too. If you can do that, there’s no way our show will fail!”

“Muuu… I’m not sure that’s how it works,” Sora said, and shifted again until she was lying on top of Sham in the same orientation. She put her chin on the top of Sham’s head, and put her arms around her shoulders in a strange kind of hug. They were like two layers in a supremely cute sponge cake. “But I’ll try. Even if my idol power isn’t as strong as yours.”

“Don’t worry. It’s fine. You’ll get there, Sora. I know that inside you, there’s a great idol just waiting to come out. And until it does, you can rely on me,” Sham said. “Because, I think… right now, my idol power is the strongest it’s ever been.”

Sora said nothing, but she continued to be soft and warm and not that heavy, which was all anybody could demand of her in today’s day and age. As the minutes ticked by, her breathing slowed, and became softer, more feathery; it was a while before Sham even realised that she was asleep, and that her own fate was sealed. Sora slept until she woke up, and nothing – short of a nuclear war – could change that.

Sham yawned. She had done lifts, and she had told a story. Maybe that was enough cause for her to take a nap herself. Just a small one. A sneaky little slumber, for a sore-armed starlet.

They didn’t get much practice done that day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Credit where credit is due: I did reference a few friends in this chapter. I believe it was Gloochi on the tweet machine who mentioned the idea of 'Blackberries' being a dream that Nath had, and I liked that enough to run with it. And a friend called Whiskas mentioned a while back that they'd like to see stories about Sham in the immediate post-war period, which is sort've what this delves into. There'll probably be a bit of a break between this part and the next bit of the UWG series, since I think folks are probably looking for some non-Sora/Sham/Nath content by now (and I also need to watch some idol stuff for research...), but hopefully people have enjoyed it so far.


	49. Bittersweet

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a (late) birthday present for Altela/Lalo on twitter, introducing their favourite character into the survivalverse at last.

It’s my turn to pick our rendezvous point, so we’re meeting at a diner this year. Thank God. When it’s _not_ my turn, we end up meeting at fancy teahouses or sushi bars. I wouldn’t mind, but you can’t get a good cup of coffee there to save your life. Some days – not often, now, but they still happen – coffee is all that stands between me and genocide.

It’s a small place, just off one of the old by-roads heading up into the mountains. Nobody ends up there by choice – only truckers and day-trippers without other options. The food, according to intelligence reports, is cheap and tastes cheap. Hygiene rating: three out of five. Acceptable risks. I order a strong black coffee and a coffee with milk and two sugars from a blank-eyed waitress, and sit down. Nobody bats an eyelid. Most are consumed with newspapers, or the tinny television set in the corner. Not one of them seems to have noticed I didn’t arrive in a car. It doesn’t seem like I’ve been followed.

My contact arrives two minutes and thirty seconds late, wearing a white button-down long sleeved shirt, black slacks, suspenders, and a red tie knotted loosely over an unbuttoned collar. Notepad in the right hand chest pocket. The entire look screams ‘local reporter’, and they make a point of sweeping their gaze across the whole diner, looking more at the fixtures and fittings than the people. The waitress takes notice, and straightens her posture. It looks like we’ll get good service today.

“Ah, Alte,” they say as they sit down. “How’re you holding up?”

I take a sip of coffee. _Alte_. I don’t hear that name very often any more. The particulars of my job mean I have to take pseudonyms, or else go by title. I might only hear it once a year, at meetings like these. But no matter how much time passes, or if anybody ever uses it, it will always be my name. Because ‘Alte’ was the woman who fell in love with my husband. And I am still that woman.

“How do you think?” I ask.

Their eyes become a little sly. I know they’re going to dodge the question before they open their mouth. “You got my order wrong again.”

I tap my index finger on the table. “No. _You_ got your order wrong. You drink white with two sugars. You _think_ you drink it black with one sugar, but you don’t.”

“Oh, _right_. Sorry. We always forget about that.”

I frown. My contact is Mira: two people, one body. One of the stranger experiments military science has produced, although not the most cataclysmic. Their condition isn’t debilitating, necessarily, but it comes with baggage. Particularly with food. Their memories come from a different body, with different taste buds. And memories about food are hard to get rid of.

Mira, as a rule, irritates me. We’re very different people. They have such a high level of skill that they don’t take things seriously enough; I can only claim to be average at most things, but I counter that with preparation. When one of us is so laid-back and the other so serious, there’s bound to be friction from time to time.

But if I had to lay down my life for any one person on this planet, it would be them.

They saved me, ten thousand years ago. They lost their fight against that monster from the enemy side; as I understand it, everybody did. But that girl – _Sora_ – was naive. She had high specifications and natural talent, but she didn’t understand war the way we did, and she’d definitely never met anybody using the weapons that Mira could. She saw an explosion, and thought that it was done. She probably never even imagined that an old-fashioned smoke bomb could be so convincing.

After that, the war turned; the enemy, finally seeing the true potential of their mislaid weapon, started trying to retrieve her. They sent their best weapons to do the job, and while they were away, Mira snuck in. They were looking for medical supplies for their wounds, weapons, anything to help them survive. They found me, heavily wounded, awaiting analysis, interrogation, and eventual indoctrination or dissections by the enemy research team. I don’t know what possessed them to save me and burden themselves with a crippled woman, but they did.

We fled, and were pursued half-heartedly; the enemy side seemed to be anticipating _some_ kind of victory. What they _got_ was the apocalypse. In the dark days that followed, Mira nursed me back to health, mostly against my wishes. I had given up; I knew that my husband was gone, perished in the fire, and any life I could have returned to was over.

Those times are a blur to me, but I remember small parts of them. I remember Mira cooking for us, traditional recipes from their home country – dried mackerel, and little _manju_ filled with red bean paste. They were far too sweet for me and I couldn’t stomach them, but even now, I still get a little bit nostalgic about that taste.

“Being honest with you,” they say, tenting their fingers, “you look… awful. Have you been eating right? You’ve lost weight.”

“Don’t put your elbows on the table.”

“Oh, right.”

They put their elbows down, and I press my fingers to the bridge of my nose. They’re right, in a sense; I _have_ lost some weight. I needed to. It feels like every year I get… rounder. Softer. Consequences of a sedentary job. Every year I try to shed the pounds I put on, with varying success. _This_ year, I have no choice in the matter. I need to be in peak form, and I need to stay there.

“Of course I look awful. Have you heard the news?” I ask.

They settle back into their chair. Although sometimes I feel like they left the good brain with their other body, Mira _can_ think, surprisingly deeply. They like to pretend otherwise. “Maybe. What news are we talking about? We’re not _all_ heads of intelligence, you know.”

I tap my finger once on the table: _quiet_. I’m fairly sure this is a safe meeting spot, and there’s not much out there that could harm weapons like Mira and I, but it’s still safer to be circumspect about my position. It avoids trouble, and I have no patience for trouble.

“What else could it be?” I ask tartly. “That… _thing_ woke up. After all this time.”

Mira settles back in their chair, a sardonic smile flitting across their lips. “Pretty sure that _thing_ is a girl.”

“She’s a monster.”

“We’re all monsters, from a certain point of view. Did we ever tell you about reincarnation?”

The answer is yes, at great length, and she knows it. We used to talk about reincarnation a lot right after the war. For me, it was… I suppose, a beacon of hope. The idea that my husband could be reborn, the same soul in a different body, and I could find him again… who wouldn’t be tempted by that? It took me maybe five hundred years to accept that it was a dangerous fantasy. Even if I could find him again, and we recognised each other, my husband has the right to become a new person. The things I’ve seen and done, the wounds I have, would only weigh him down.

Mira seems to believe in reincarnation, even though they have a very negative view of it. They believe that people like us, who have lived far longer than our natural lifespans, are cursed; we have been trapped inside our bodies, unable to return to the natural cycle. They think are souls have grown twisted by their confinement, rendered into something strange and inhuman by our lifespan. They may be right. After all, Mira has experienced a soul being put into a new body for themselves; of all the people on the planet, they may be the highest authority on the matter.

“She saved the _world_ , Alte. Bona fide hero material, order of the red scarf. That’s gotta earn her some brownie points, right?” they continue.

“She saved _bits_ of the world,” I hiss. “Your village didn’t look _like_ it was saved.”

I regret that last part immediately; the way Mira carries themself, the way they fight, the tools they use, are all part of a long tradition. It’s a tradition they miss. Every so often they try to take an apprentice, but there’s no call for the skills they have to teach, and the art dies out again within a generation or two.

“…Our culture was on the way out, anyway. It was on its last legs before the war, and then we sent all our able-bodied to the front. We couldn’t have survived. We just got a quick death instead of a slow one,” they say, after a moment.

I’m jealous of that. I’m jealous of how they seem to have moved on from the past. Sometimes, I feel like I have; sometimes, I feel like I can’t. It’s a work in progress. It probably always will be.

“Why are you defending her?”

“Because you’re biased,” they shrug. “What are you scared of? What do you think she’s going to do?”

“I don’t _know_ , and that’s what scares me. She was erratic during the war. Offering ceasefires, defecting, fraternising with the enemy, fighting her own side… Now she’s back. Just as unpredictable. Just as capable of killing. We have no _data_ , we don’t know her objectives, all we know is that she fought a weapon that decimated the planet on even terms–”

“Ah, we’re gonna have to correct you there,” Mira says, with a rueful smile. “ _You_ have no data.”

My mouth snaps shut. I level my gaze at them, but I can’t sense a joke or a lie in their expression. “...You’ve got data on her? How?”

“She lives with those so-called ‘guardians’, right? The blonde one’s really chatty with people at the door – you know, salespeople, peddlers, that kind of thing. Some of the ones she speaks to are… well. You know. The traditional kind. _Tekiya._ A little money changes hands somewhere… You know the drill.”

_This_ is why I respect Mira. They’re flaky, and their priorities are in the wrong place. But the moment you underestimate them, they show you why you shouldn’t. “So, what have you got?”

“Nothing that interesting, honestly.” We pause the discussion for a second as the waitress offers us a refill. My cup has emptied itself almost without me knowing. Order the same again, and Mira asks for one more sugar in theirs. When she’s safely away from our table, I gesture for Mira to continue. “She seems like a normal – well, maybe she’s a little strange, but she seems like she’s enjoying a normal life. She has a flock of ducks for pets, she’s a deep sleeper, she works the garden out back. Sometimes she goes out with her friends–”

“That’s another thing I don’t like,” I cut in. “I’ve kept tabs on those two, Sham and Nath, for a long time. They haven’t done anything interesting in hundreds, maybe even _thousands_ of years. But the moment _she_ comes along, they’re on her like flies on honey. Why? Isn’t it suspicious how every surviving weapon from that army just leapt to her side?”

Mira grimaces, but says nothing. They don’t have an answer for that. Three people who haven’t met for ten thousand years suddenly making a rendezvous in two years or less goes beyond coincidence. I take another sip of coffee and continue. “We need to find Tsih–”

“We really don’t,” they say flatly, their nose wrinkling in displeasure. “We’d rather work alone than with her, even if she _is_ alive.”

Well… I can’t say I don’t understand what they’re talking about. Tsih had some… _issues_ with her personality. From what I gathered, she acted like a child, but she may have been even older than I was. Unpredictable, too. It’s all empty conjecture, anyway. Tsih was the most well-equipped to fade into the background after the war. If she wants to stay hidden, we have no chance of finding her.

“Anyway, you’re exaggerating this and you know it. Sham and Nath can’t fight. You told us that yourself once. The weapons they relied on don’t exist any more.”

I am silent. She’s right, but she’s not airing her real criticism of me out loud. What Mira wants to say – what I _know_ they want to say – is that it’s not our problem. They’re not ‘the enemy’ any more. They haven’t been for thousands of years. They don’t even know we’re alive, and they’re probably not plotting anything. Mira wants me to let it go.

On the ring finger of my left hand is a golden ring – a little worn by time, but still there. Needless to say, I’m not good at letting things go.

The discussion draws to a halt. Another cup of coffee comes and goes. I can almost taste the filter paper.

“...hah,” they sigh. “You’re going to get paranoid about this, aren’t you?”

“I’m head of intelligence. Being paranoid is my job.”

“Fine. Fine! Just so you know, we don’t wanna touch this one with a ten foot pole. But if it’ll stop you doing something drastic, we’ll go out and gather some info ourselves,” Mira says. “But if we can’t find anything, we drop it. _You_ drop it. Agreed?”

I hesitate. I… don’t like this proposition. Deep down, I know that Mira is the best person to entrust this to. Good at infiltration, mostly unbiased, and crucially, they stand a chance at fighting their way out. Of the war machines of the past, Tsih’s whereabouts are unknown. Nath and Sham are unable to fight. And I haven’t lifted a gun myself in hundreds of years. But Mira never relied on high-tech weaponry; what they use is timeless, easy to replace. They’ve kept their skills sharp, too, holding on to those old traditions; of all of us, they’re easily the closest to their old combat strength.

But theoretically, that monster’s strength hasn’t degraded either. Her weapons were in storage with her, and she’s had no time for her skills to atrophy; for her, the war is a recent memory. She won against Mira before. There’s no reason she couldn’t again.

I can’t… lose Mira like that. We only meet once a year, and they drives me crazy when we do, but they’re as close a friend as I’ve ever had. I’ve known them for ten thousand years. They’re like a part of me. I sometimes scoff at their strange obsession with being a hero, but they definitely save people. Definitely.

“…If you feel like it’s dangerous, even for a second, pull out,” I say, making a flat gesture with my hand. “If you get info, it’s fine. If you don’t, it’s fine. I’ll back off either way. Just don’t put yourself at risk.”

“Yeah, yeah,” they say breezily.

“I’m serious, Mira.”

“We know. Hey, let’s talk about something else for a bit, huh? We only meet up once a year, so it seems a shame to waste it talking about serious stuff.” They wink conspiratorially. “We really gotta go out drinking again sometime. We got some manju for you, too.”

I sigh, but not unhappily. “You know manju are too sweet for me.”

“We know. But we just felt like you wanted some.”

“You’re not wrong. I was missing the taste, a little. And they’ll go well with the bitter coffee.”

We don’t speak about business any more than that – for the rest of the day, we’re just two very, very old friends – old enough to bicker, to tease, and not worry that we’ll take offence. I don’t know how we got this way, but I’m glad we did. I think my husband would be happy to know I’ve got a friend like this. I know he would.

This world, that my husband lived in – the world my husband loved – I won’t let anything happen to it. I won’t permit anybody to ruin it. Not Sora, or anyone else. Mira and I will get to the bottom of this. I promise it.


	50. Yaks and Mountains

Contrary to popular belief, Nanako was not that sensitive about her height. Sure, making cracks about how she was short was grounds for her to excommunicate you and then suplex you into the sun, but that was the whole _point._ It was an excuse for irrational hatred of everything, or at least chronic irritation, and Nanako was never happier than the moment _right_ before she ripped somebody a new one. She needed an excuse, and her height just happened to be a fantastic jumping off point.

But despite that, she still had a grudge against tall things. In her opinion, tall people just uselessly took up space; if you chopped Kyoko off at the knees, you’d still have almost a full Nanako’s worth of height to work with. All those extra inches were completely unnecessary – hedonistic, even. Being tall was a symptom of some wider moral corruption, in Nanako’s not-so-humble opinion. (It didn’t help that the tallest person she had ever known went by the name of Shifu. In some ways, it was no wonder she projected.)

So, given that she had a stated antipathy to tall things, one may have wondered why she was dressed in a heavy sheepskin coat, fording her way through waist-deep snow on her way to the peak of a mountain – which, to be clear, are very high on the great big list of tall things. In fact, mountains tend to be very high in most contexts. It’s part of being a mountain.

Nanako herself was wondering why she was climbing a mountain, or, more accurately, why she had let herself be persuaded to climb one. Kae, for reasons that made sense only in a world full of fire and loud onomatopoeia, wanted to hug a yak. Presumably, Nanako thought, it was because yaks were large, smelly, stupid, ugly, and hairy in places that didn’t bear thinking about – much like Kae herself. But Kae, at least, stayed where you could see her. They hadn’t seen a single yak so far, even though they’d been looking as hard as they could, and to Nanako this indicated that yaks were sneaky and suspicious and ought to be vaporised on sight, preferably before the yak smell could waft over to them.

Ordinarily, she would have just flown up the mountain. But flying was apparently against the rules; Kae insisted that they walk as far as was possible before they gave up and ‘cheated’. What kind of idiot thought flying was _cheating,_ Nanako wondered? How was using an ability you _had_ a cheat? It’d be like being bitten by a shark and saying, ‘oh, it doesn’t count because the shark cheated. After all, sharks can swim.’

It did give her the opportunity to observe Kae tumbling from snowdrift to snowdrift, throwing herself bodily into them like a hyperactive Saint Bernard. That was always good for a laugh. And if you _had_ to make your way up a horrible ugly mountain covered with horrible ugly snow, there were worse horrible ugly companions than Kae, who was at all times warm and toasty and potentially on fire. Really, apart from the fact that she hated pretty much everything she was doing, Nanako was having a pretty good time.

“Are you _sure_ there’s yaks here?” she asked bitterly as another lump of snow exploded into smaller lumps of snow under the great force of a Kae-issue body slam. “Is this even a yak-bearing mountain?”

“There’ll be yaks at the monastery,” Kae said confidently, puffing up her chest. It was puffed up enough already for Nana’s tastes. “And there’ll be soup! Soup!”

Kae’s passion for soup was a mild mystery. She loved soup, regardless of flavour, probably because Nanako hated it. Nanako hated almost every food except things that were fried and greasy and horrible, because they made her feel like garbage for the whole day and she could complain about it accordingly. But Kae liked to set up a camp fire with a little copper-bottomed saucepan and heat up some soup until it was hot and delicious, and if they could get some nice crusty rolls they’d have those too, and it was all very agreeable so Nanako was forced to just be quiet and enjoy it. Sometimes, if they had any little scraps of leftovers – or had lucked into some meat – Kae would make a stew, and _that_ was usually so good that Nana felt angry about it for the entire next day.

Although they hadn’t seen any yaks, they’d seen plenty of goats. Goats were okay. They loitered around the landscape, stood at strange and impossible angles, and generally wasted time being goat-y when they could have been anything else, but Nanako felt an odd kind of kinship towards them. Anything that would try and headbutt Kae deserved at least some grudging respect, and they were at least smart enough to know they were beaten after she wrestled them and let them go. They weren’t sneaky, unlike yaks, which was the main thing.

They saw no yaks, sneaky or otherwise, until they reached the monastery at the top of the mountain – which they hit rather sooner than they had initially believed. Unbeknownst to them, mountain climbing was not what it used to be, and there was in fact a worldwide shortage of mountains on which to climb. Mostly this was because most of the _really_ big mountains had had bits shot off them or been exploded or otherwise molested in the course of the Great War. Suguri could and had done many things in the course of her planet regeneration, but she couldn’t just install more mountains as if they were flat-pack furniture. It was also the nature of existing mountains that, like senior citizens and ice cream cones, they became shorter and more horizontal over time.

The monastery was also not nearly as large as they were expecting. Somewhere in Nanako’s mind was a fairy-tale picture of huge blocky buildings with colourful roof tiles and little gold whatsits on the walls; instead, it was made with wood and also possibly reinforced concrete. It _was_ blocky, though. Presumably, all the fancier monasteries had gotten shot off along with the top of the mountain, and monks – who were either not inclined towards worldly possessions, or else inclined towards embezzlement if they were – had settled on a more spartan living situation.

They were greeted at the gate by a short man who numbered amongst his possessions a robe with very long sleeves and a few wisps of greying hair left on his head; he did, however, smile, which meant Kae adored him immediately. Nanako remained suspicious, because _somebody_ had to be.

“Hello!” Kae boomed, finding one of his hands inside the sleeves and shaking it wildly. “Can you teach me kung fu?”

“I am not that kind of monk,” he said kindly, as indulging a favourite grandchild. “This is a place of quiet contemplation, nothing more.”

“Oh! Do you do meditation under waterfalls?”

The monk looked around, as if to imply that if there were any waterfalls around, they, like the yaks, must be stealth-equipped. “We meditate, yes. And we farm.”

“Can you teach us to meditate?” Kae asked, and then dropped her voice to what she probably thought was a whisper. “It’s just… My friend has issues. With anger. She probably won’t stop being angry, but I’m thinking that maybe if we can get her to _manage_ it, she’ll feel better sometimes. It’s worth a try, right?”

“I do _not_ need anger management,” Nanako seethed. It was true, in a sense. Management was what you did when a particular resource, like trees or land or people desperate enough to work in a menial and soul-destroying customer service position, was finite and needed to be preserved. Nanako’s anger was not. “And why are you bothering a _monk_ about this? Have you heard of psychiatrists?”

“Yeah, but they give you therapy. Monks give you either inner peace _or_ kung fu, so I thought it was worth a try.”

The monk continued to smile, although perhaps less certainly than before. Being a monk was a pretty quiet life, and didn’t do wonders for your social skills; Kae and Nanako were a challenge he wondered if he could meet. “You may stay a while and observe our traditions, if you like – provided you are respectful of our way of life, and you work your fair share.”

“Oh, don’t worry,” Kae replied, flexing her arms. The heavy winter coat she wore didn’t do a lot to emphasise her muscles. “I’ll do tons of work! I’m great at working!”

“And your friend?” the monk asked mildly.

Nanako gave her most long-suffering sigh, and balled her hands into tiny little fists that were full of barely suppressed rage and also fingernails. “Well… I’d hate to have wasted this whole stupid trip. So I guess we can stay. For a _little_ while.”

That was the problem with Kae, she reflected as the monk led them to their quarters, which were shabby enough to fuel her complaints for an entire week. The redhead was an idiot, but she wasn’t _stupid_. She thought. She planned. And when she planned, she planned stuff like this, where she did annoying things entirely for Nanako’s benefit. She’d done the same kind of thing about three weeks ago when she suddenly decided, after _months_ of wanting a puppy, that she wanted a cat instead. After hours of arguing and two rounds of bare-knuckle boxing, she finally revealed that it was because cats were soothing to stroke and their purrs were relaxing, so they might help calm Nana down. Of course, Nana had had to put her foot down, and state unequivocally that they were getting a dog and not a cat, and it wasn’t until the next day that she realised this was a significant upgrade from her previous ‘no pets at all, ever’ stance.

Kae was always doing things like that. And it was worse because she _thought_ about it – she never tried to do things that would make Nana less angry, because she understood it was an impossibility and that at this point, being angry was a part of who Nana was. Instead, she always wanted to do things that might help Nana calm down when she didn’t want to be angry. It was infuriating, and the worst part was that it was hard to get mad about it because it was so well-intentioned.

So Nanako did the only thing she could: she threw herself down on the little straw-filled mattress that was their bedding for the next few weeks, she complained, and she cuddled up against her big, stupid best friend for warmth.

“There aren’t even any yaks,” she muttered darkly into Kae’s abdomen. “It’s all goats. I don’t think there’s a single yak on this entire goddamn mountain.”

“There’ll be yaks another time,” Kae said happily. “I’ll come and meditate with you after I finish chopping firewood tomorrow.”

“You’d better. I don’t want to sit there and experience peace and tranquillity by myself like some kind of idiot. You have to do it too.”

“I will!”

For a few seconds there was a comfortable silence, broken only by the sound of goats doing goat-y things outside.

“…I was kinda hoping it’d be the kung-fu kind of monks, though. That would have been way more fun. Do we have any soup left?”

“We do. Give me a spicy one so we can at least warm up. I’ll get the pot.”

The two settled down for dinner together, at the top of a mountain with no yaks on it. Enlightenment would probably elude them for some time yet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was requested by Quincy. I deliberately kept it quick and breezy, since life's thrown me for a loop lately and it's nice to do something loose.


	51. Do us Part (Alte Day story)

For just one moment, all is as it should be.

She drinks it in, luxuriates in it. His hand on her waist, the smell of his cologne. Gentle music in the background. He even lit candles. Candles! They’re so hard to find nowadays. She dimly remembers there being rationing when she was a child, but it was never quite as intense as it is now – and yet, there are far fewer people.

She stops herself, shakes her head. This time is rare, and precious. She won’t let anything else get in the way.

“Darling,” she whispers. “I’ve missed you so much. Every minute, of every day.”

“I’ve missed you too,” her husbands whispers back. “Alte. My dear, sweet Alte.”

She leans her head against his chest and exhales. Feels the knot of emotion, hardened by battle, begin to come loose.

They’ve given her leave, or what passes for it, after what they called ‘a particularly successful scouting mission’. It wasn’t a success, and it wasn’t a scouting mission. It was a hastily scrambled offence following an enemy retreat, and the casualties were atrocious for both sides. These desperate gambles seem to be the only thing either army has strength for; they scrabble with their fingernails on both sides, never truly stabilising before the next bout of desperation. Circling the drain.

Even these few moments are not sacred. Nothing is. They can scramble her at any time, for any reason; not a second goes by when she doesn’t fear being snatched from her husband’s arms by the grasping hands of the military.

But, as scant as it might be, this time is all they have. There are no sights left worth seeing, no landmarks left untouched; the last cities now are on their knees, and Mother Nature has fallen barren under the demands of her most grasping children.

So, they dance. They dance as they danced on their wedding day, looking into each other’s eyes, letting the world take care of itself for just a little while. They are a little clumsy, a little stiff; her husband was never a sprightly sort, and her war wounds have begun to catch up with her. But this is all they’ve got. It’s all they need. It has to be.

“How are things going with the spaceship?” she asks.

“...Better than we could have hoped,” he says. She loves his voice; grave, but warm at the same time. Even about the silliest little things. “The AI that will guide the ship was born quite recently.”

She raises an eyebrow. “Born? You mean made.”

“Not quite. She’s… well. Not human, but close to human. She needs to be. She’ll be guiding that ship for hundreds, thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of years… She needs to be human enough for people to love her, and for her to love them in return.”

She smiles. In her heart of hearts, she thinks it a childish, naive kind of idea. But the fact that her husband – a grave, serious man, with an intellect polished in every facet until it gleamed – could still have such ideas, and pursue them with such earnestness, was important to her.

Still, she prods him a little, challenges him – as she knows he likes her to. “You’re sure a regular AI couldn’t do it? It would only need to monitor the systems, after all.”

“Ah, but… In a sense, the settlers aboard that ship will be a brand new genesis for the human race. The greatest minds left to this planet will be among them, but… well. The greatest minds have grown old, and… in a sense, they’ve been defeated. We are retreating, my love,” he says, a little sheepishly. “Those people – that new society – to avoid the mistakes of the humans that came before them, they will need guidance, and they will need it after we’re gone.”

She gives him a crooked smile. No, not crooked. Perhaps ‘dented’ would be a better word. “It’ll take more than a little guidance to redeem human nature, my love. I can’t help but feel you’re being too optimistic.”

“Perhaps,” he admits. “But being here, with you, is the reason I _can_ be optimistic.”

“Oh, you.”

They kiss for a while, and she is happy; discussion is all well and good, but it doesn’t make her heart pound the way his lips do. Nothing does.

“But yes… it’s progressing well, my love. According to her simulator results, she’s already mastered the subsystems of the ship. Now they’re just teaching her… well, human things. Showing her films, fashion magazines, flowers. Things like that. Trying to get her to understand us,” he carries on, when they’re ready to talk again.

“I see. Almost like a child.” Her heart aches a little as she says the word. “Maybe you should teach her how to dance.”

He chuckles gently. “That might be an idea.”

“Who else will? I can’t imagine any of those stuffy scientists know how.”

“It’s not like I’m any better.”

“That’s never stopped us,” she replies, stroking his face fondly. “You want to dance with me, and I want to dance with you. It’s the desire that matters. Not the skill. Although, if you’d like to stop stepping on my toes, I wouldn’t complain.”

“I think… that spaceship will be long gone before I learn to dance properly. I don’t have time to be teaching anybody else.” He grins bashfully, and takes her hand again.

As they dance, he never asks her how things are going at the front. She doesn’t talk about the front. The front is the front, and right now, she’s not on the front; she is here, and she is in his arms, and that’s where she has every intention of staying – body and mind. The front can take care of itself.

She could take herself out of the war, if only for a little while. But she’s finding it more and more difficult to take the war out of herself.

“Darling,” she says, haltingly, “I need to speak to you about something.” Her voice, which is always sweeter and lighter with her husband, dips a little; for a second, it is stern, and grim. “Do you remember our wedding vows?”

“As though it were yesterday,” he replies. His hands are steady, and his voice level.

“Till death do us part. That was what we said.”

“That,” he says, hesitating, “was what we said.”

“Which means–” She bites her tongue, chokes on the words. “Which means, if one of us dies, the other is free. If things go badly, and – I, I mean, in the war, and – if I’m not around anymore, you… You need to be aboard that ship.” She squeezes his hand as tightly as she dares; hers is a grip that can hold a machine gun steady. “You need to be… be free. And be happy. Without me. Promise me.”

“Alte, I–”

“Promise me.”

“...Yes. Of course,” he lies. She’s the one who loves him the most. Knows him the most. She can hear it in his voice. “But in that case, my love, your… _treatments_ will extend your life beyond mine. So, when I die, you must be free as well. To love other people. Even to forget me, if you must. Promise me.”

“…Okay. I promise,” she lies back.

His brow wrinkles, and she knows that he has seen through her as well. But they don’t have _time_ to argue about it. They have to enjoy what they have. The future, like the front, must take care of itself; there are things they need in the here and the now.

“I’m sorry. I spoiled the mood, but I really do adore all the effort you put in for tonight,” she says. “The music, the candles… even the dancing. It almost feels like our wedding day all over again.”

“Well,” he says, and scratches his chin. “We did just exchange vows, after a fashion.”

She kisses him again, and subtly repositions the hand that’s on her waist. “Come to think of it, I recall that we did something else on our wedding day as well.”

The corners of his eyes crinkle as he smiles. “Wasn’t that the honeymoon?”

“That’s just what we told your parents.”

She doesn’t know how long she has left with her husband. She never does. They live balanced on the edge of a knife, and no matter which way they step, it cuts. But there’s no sense in not moving. They have to seize their opportunities, at every chance they can. Make the most of every hour.

But for Alte, the next few hours will fly by very quickly indeed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was a short piece done by request from somebody in the OJ community. There are a few days of the year that people devote to characters (7/7 is Nanako day, and 7/10 is Nath day if I recall correctly); they wanted to make an Alte Day on March 11th. Sorry for the slow updates; I'm not actually active in fanfiction right now, and am instead attending to other projects.


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